Saturday, September 19, 2009

Chef Daddy



Dustin has taken a major interest in cooking lately, which is fiiiiine by me because cooking dinner is about the last thing I want to do when I get home from work.

Like all things, Dustin doesn't just "dabble" a little... he goes all out! The Food Network is now one of his new favorite channels (second only to ESPN) and he's become obsessed with shows like Top Chef, Iron Chef America, etc.

So a few years ago, while visiting Napa, Dustin and I had the pleasure of eating at The French Laundry restaurant. This restaurant is pretty much impossible to get a reservation (thank you Fred) and the 9+ course meal is out of this world, literally. I won't even tell you how much this meal cost us... let's just say it was back when the real estate market was MUCH better. At any rate, one of our favorite courses was a dish called "Peas and Carrots". Sounds simple right- maybe even a little gross?? Well well well, don't let the name of the dish deceive you. Thomas Keller's idea of peas and carrots is a lobster crepe served above a ginger-carrot emulsion with a pea shoot salad on top. Fancy fancy. (No, we don't eat like this every day, not even every year.)

When Dustin told me he bought the French Laundry cookbook so he could try to make Peas and Carrots, I said "Oh honey, that's a great idea" but in my head I was thinking "Has he gone mad????". So we decided to have a big family dinner so Dustin could put his newly acquired cooking skills to the test. Gathering up all of the ingredients took almost a week- you can't just run to the neighborhood grocery store to get all the fancy-pants things you need. Cooking the dinner took almost 2 full days- the recipe was three pages long... single-spaced, in paragraph form!! Needless to say there were a lot of steps. The most dramatic of which was dropping the three LIVE lobsters into a mixture of boiling butter water. Anyone that knows Dustin knows that he's a huge animal lover... He's the guy that catches a fly and then releases it outside. So the "killing the lobsters" step was hard. If only we didn't love the taste of lobster so much...

So after all the hard work and planning, I'm proud to say... dinner was AMAZING!!! It was fabulous, "melt in your mouth", "better than I remember", "omg I can't believe my husband made that" DELICIOUS!!! In addition to the Peas and Carrots, Dustin also made two more courses- mussels and sea bass (another recipe from Thomas Keller). Dylan and I were so proud. Because Dustin did such a great job, I've officially named him "Top Chef" of the Bradley house.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That is awesome! I wish I could have been there for dinner! HE can come to Michigan and cook anytime! Love Julie