June 17, 2014 Stuffed fried squash blossoms, grilled steak, asparagus and sautéed mushrooms

June 17, 2014  Stuffed fried squash blossoms, grilled steak, asparagus and sautéed mushrooms

Glory Be, we finally have prepared a whole new meal.  

When I came home from a dental appointment, I thawed a rib eye steak. When Suzette came home we had a discussion about what to cook.  I suggested that we had to use the squash blossoms I had bought at Pro’s Ranch market on Saturday.   As I was walking through the produce section last Saturday I ran into Claudie, the owner/chef of la Crêpe Michel in Old Town, with a basket filled with two bunches of squash blossoms.  I asked her how she fixed them and she said, “ fill them with goat cheese and coat them with a batter of egg whites and some flour, and fry them.”  That was good enough for me.  I thanked her and soon found the bundles of squash blossoms on an upper shelf among the other produce for $1.99 per bunch of about a dozen blossoms.  

I bought two bunches, thinking we could cook them for dinner for Saturday evening with Ricardo and Cynthia.  Only later did I realize that our menu for Saturday evening of Mediterranean apricot and chicken skewers was set and not amenable to fried squash blossoms.  So the squash blossoms sat in our fridge until tonight, when I practically demanded that we use them for dinner.  Suzette reluctantly agreed and said, “We need to tempura them.”  I said, “Okay, but Claudie said she uses egg whites and flour.”  Without further objection I got out a box of tempura batter mix.  The instructions were easy enough, 1 cup of tempura batter mix combined with 1 cup of water.  Soon I had prepared the batter in a mixing bowl. 

At Suzette’s comment that we needed a dipping sauce, I followed the recipe on the tempura box for a dipping sauce made with Mirin, soy sauce, and water, but I added some Japanese rice vinegar to give it a little zip.

Then I went to the garden to pick a stalk of oregano and several stalks of lavender flowers for the filling. 

Suzette washed and spun the squash blossoms, which caused their leaves to shatter a bit.  Then I tried to remove the style that sticks out of the middle of the blossom as Claudie had recommended, but broke more leaves.  Suzette put about ½ of a package of goat cheese into the Cuisinart with the oregano leaves and lavender flowers and a bit of salt and pureed them together with 1 Tbsp. of heavy cream.  Finally, I stopped trying to remove styles and let Suzette fill the blossoms.  Suzette then poured about 1/3 inch of canola oil into one of our deeper skillets and heated it.  She then dipped the blossoms into the tempura batter and dropped them into the hot oil.  They did not get very brown but did get very stiff when the batter fried and firmed.  

the egg batter coating

 We decided we needed to go back to the drawing board on the batter, and decided to follow Claudie’s instructions more closely.  Suzette broke two eggs and put the whites into a mixing bowl and I whipped them with a whisk into a soft peak.  Then we added about ¼ cup of tempura batter to the egg whites and whisked that together.  The egg and tempura batter made a much lighter and puffy batter and when we dipped the blossoms into the egg batter and fried them they produced a much softer textured coating.  But we did not like it either because it soaked up a lot of grease.  We still have some tempura batter mix and squash blossoms, so next time we will add about ½ cup of tempura batter to two eggs and we think that will produce a nearly perfect coating for the blossoms.  

Having dealt with the squash blossoms, we turned our attention to the rest of the meal.   I sliced about 2 cups of baby portobella mushrooms, some of which had been in the fridge several weeks and were showing their age, which means that the flesh of the mushrooms had darkened and they had become water logged.  I cut them up anyway and sliced several mushrooms from a new box of portobella mushrooms we had bought at Costco last week.

I then chopped up four or five cloves of fresh garlic we had harvested from our garden on Sunday and peeled and minced the PPI ½ shallot I found in the fridge.  When Suzette salted and peppered the steak and took it out to the grill, I melted about 1 ½ Tbsps. of butter in a non-stick skillet and added the garlic and shallots to the skillet as the butter melted and heated.  I stirred the garlic and shallots to coat them with butter and cooked them for a couple of minutes and then added the mushrooms and tossed them in the pan.  After a few more minutes when the mushrooms had given off their liquid and started to dry out I added about ¼ cup of Amontillado sherry to the mushrooms and let them cook at a low temperature.

I then cut the bases off ½ of the bunch of lovely young asparagus I had bought at Sprouts the other day for $1.98/lb. I then put them into the basket of our steamer and washed them off in the sink and filled the steamer with water to just under the level of the basket and put it on the stove. I fetched the pitcher half full of béarnaise sauce and placed it on the stove between the skillet full of mushrooms and the steamer so the béarnaise sauce would warm just enough to remove the refrigerator chill from it but not melt it.  

When Suzette flipped the steak for its last five minutes on the grill I started the steamer.  When Suzette brought the grilled steak into the kitchen I turned off the heat under the steamer and the mushrooms.  While she sliced the steak, I ran to the basement and grabbed a bottle of 2007 Wellington Vineyards Mohrhardt Ridge Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon.  This is one of the best bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon wine we have ever drunk.  It was $25.00 from Wellington’s Wine Club.  The Wellington Vineyard recently sold and I hope the new owners continue to produce this wine because I have never had a better Cabernet Sauvignon. Although I love the big fruity Stags Leap district Napa Valley’s Cabs, they lack the soft elegance of Wellington’s Mohrhardt Ridge cab.

   

We each filled a plate with mushrooms, slices of steak, asparagus and squash blossoms and dabbed spoonfuls of the now softened béarnaise sauce on the warm asparagus and steak, grabbed our glasses of wine and took them to the table on the patio and enjoyed dinner as we watched the evening sunlight brighten the plants in the raised bed garden area.

This was the best meal we have cooked in at least three days.  We both loved the super tender rib eye steak which was bought at Albertsons on sale for $8.99 per lb.  Albertsons sells USDA Choice beef for really good prices on sale.  

The tender young asparagus were cooked to perfection.  The squash blossoms were interesting.  The tempura ones were hard and the goat cheese mostly had dried up inside of them.  The egg batter ones were much better, softer with better coverage of the squash blossom, but we both agreed that the egg batter needed to be a little stiffer.  So next time we will use two egg whites and ½ cup of tempura batter and a bit of cream.    

This wonderful dinner was worth all the effort.

After dinner we still had 1/3 of the bottle of wine left so we decided to eat some cheese on toast with the last of the wine.  I went to the kitchen and sliced four slices of Fano baguette and toasted them and fetched the last of the Delice cheese (Costco).  The cheese was a little old and therefore had a higher acidity that did not complement the taste of the wine as well as the meat and other parts of the entrée. 

We enjoyed sipping the wine as we sat and watched the setting sunlight bathe the garden in golden light  and talked about the upcoming June 21 Field to Food event at the Center for Ageless Living this Saturday.  It should prove to be one of the best food events of the year, with its locally sourced gourmet food and local wines and Marie Paul’s Belgium waffles for dessert served with the basil flavored apricot butter made with the apricots we have been picking this week.  Marie Paul has been getting lots of local publicity lately because this is the fiftieth anniversary of her family’s introduction of Belgium Waffles to the U.S. at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. I will be pouring wine and beer again this year.  Viola.  We are getting excited.

Bon Appétit