Eating with Bob and Suzette: October 22, 2014 New Recipe Tres Leches Cake and Duck Breast Salad

Thursday, October 23, 2014

October 22, 2014 New Recipe Tres Leches Cake and Duck Breast Salad

New Recipes are of two distinctly different types. One type is a newly created recipe such as last night's Shrimp Scampi on a bed of Baked Spaghetti Squash from our garden. The other type is a new recipe to us in the sense that it is a standard recipe being prepared for the first time by us. Tonight's recipe of Tres Leches Cake is an example of the latter.

I had a busy day. I dealt with the building and was interviewed for TV and went to court and rode to Rio Bravo and back and went to meditate from 7:00 to 8:00.

After meditation I went to Lowe’s to buy Suzette some Baking Powder for the Tres Leches Cake she was making for Janis and Tom’s Friday night dinner party. I saw that the steak special of $5.99 for a whole slab of boneless rib eye steaks was on and saw a nice 17 ½ lb. slab of steaks for $106.00, so I bought it on a whim. When I arrived home I told Suzette that I had bought a 17 1/2 lb. slab of steaks and instead of Suzette being incredulous about my extravagant purchase, she said that Devven, the Greehouse Bistro’s new chef, and she had been discussing serving a rack of steaks aged in Pink Salt. I told her I thought the sale priced slab of steaks might work for them. I will offer to let them experiment with the slab. What fun that what appeared to have been a whim may have turned out to have been prescient and totally in line with their thinking.

When I arrived home Suzette had already baked the cake and was just starting to make the tres leches sauce that soaks into both sides of the cake. She mixed the tres leches sauce while I began preparing a duck breast salad. Then we worked together to pour ½ of the sauce on each side of the 13”X20” cake by placing parchment paper on large trays and flipping the cake two times, once to remove the cake from its pyrex baking dish and a second time to turn the cake after Suzette soaked the first side with ½ of the sauce. After the second flip the cake sat on a serving tray that had been one of my mother’s on a piece of parchment paper cut to size by Suzette, fully soaked with sauce. Suzette covered and took the cake to the garage fridge to rest and absorb the sauce for several days, as the recipe directed. Here is the recipe:

I finished cutting up two vine ripe tomatoes from Sprouts and one of the last cucumbers from our garden and heating the two PPI duck breasts from Sunday’s Roasted Duck dinner and refreshing the vinaigrette dressing by the addition of Prager’s Port Wine (www.pragerport.com) vinegar, 1 tsp. of Grey Poupon Dijon mustard and olive oil.

I then heated the PPI duck breasts in the microwave and sliced them and placed them on the top of the lettuce in a pasta bowl as the middle row between a row of diced cucumber and a row of tomatoes on either side and drizzled the dressing onto the salad by 9:00, when the new Colbert Report and John Stewart shows aired. I ran to the basement and fetched a bottle of Wellington Gold medal winning 2010 Petite Sirah and opened it and toasted several slices of French sourdough bread as Suzette took the finished tres leches cake to the garage fridge.