Mary Dan Eades, M.D.

The family gathered for a little Father’s Day/Mike’s birthday get together this past weekend. I’d planned a casual light meal for the evening that incorporated several of Mike’s favorites: steak and tomatoes.

The menu included Garden Style Gazpacho (like my usual Gazpacho Andaluz, but without going to the trouble of pressing the base through a strainer and served with the diced fresh vegetables already stirred back into the soup) and Grilled Flank Steak and Warm Mushroom Salad, Fresh Sliced Heirloom Tomatoes, a bit of baguette and brie and a nice local local wine.

I didn’t want to have to do too much work after the family got here, because when our granddaughter hits the door, it typically puts a serious crimp in her Nanny’s otherwise careful attention to slicing and dicing!

So, I marinated the flank steaks in vac-seal bags the night before using a steak rub I keep around, typically salt, black pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, and sometimes cumin. To make it easier on myself at party time, I tossed them into a 135F sous vide water bath about 11 am on party day and left them there until practically time to eat, about 8 hours, then popped them out of the bags, patted them dry, and flopped them onto a hot, oiled grill just to give them a nice sear on the outside.

The sous vide method is the only way to get a cheaper, tougher cut of meat, such as a flank steak, to come out tender as filet mignon and still perfectly medium rare. And so it was. When I cut the meat and fanned it out onto the greens, I was rewarded with perfectly cooked steak: deep pink, flavorful, and tender.

Everybody enjoyed the Gazpacho and loved the flank steak and we had a lovely evening.

It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized that I had not ever sauteed the mushrooms and fennel to add to the salad. There the bag of chopped mushrooms, sliced fennel bulb, olive oil and herbs was, still marinating in my refrigerator. So I decided to turn them into soup, which turned into an accidental hit.

If necessity, as they say, was the mother, then absent-mindedness, apparently, was the father. But whatever the genesis, it’s good eats!

Mushroom, Fennel, and Sausage Soup*
Serves 4

1 pound Cremini mushrooms (baby bellas), cleaned and quartered
1/2 bulb fresh fennel, sliced
2 tablespoons olive oil (divided use)
1/2 teaspoon Herbes de Provence
1/2 teaspoon black pepper (divided use)
1/2 pound Italian Sausage, sweet or hot, sliced
1/4 white onion, peeled and sliced
1 clove garlic, peeled and minced
1 can (14-ounces) fire roasted diced tomatoes, drained
1 tablespoon sundried tomato paste
1/4 cup sherry
1 quart chicken broth
1/4 teaspoon onion powder
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon coarse salt (or to taste)

1. In a zip bag, marinate the mushrooms and fennel with 1 tablespoon of the olive oil, Herbes, and 1/4 teaspoon of the black pepper. Refrigerate for 1 hour or up to overnight.
2. In a soup pot, heat the remaining olive oil over medium heat. Add the Italian sausage and cook for 3 or 4 minutes to give it some color.
3. Add the onions and garlic and continue to cook until they are translucent, about 2 or 3 minutes.
4. Deglaze the pan with the sherry.
5. Add the mushrooms and fennel and cook until soft, another 5 minutes or so.
6. Add the tomatoes, garlic and onion powders, remaining salt and pepper, tomato paste, and chicken broth and bring to a boil.
7. Reduce heat and simmer for another 20 minutes or so.
8. Serve hot.

*For a vegetarian option to this delicious soup, simply substitute one (14-ounce) can of soy beans, rinsed and drained, for the sausage and substitute mushroom or vegetable broth for the chicken broth.

Enjoy!

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Forgive my lengthy absence from the blog desk. As those of you who also read Mike’s blog know, I’ve been up to my eyeballs for the last month finishing a couple of major business projects and wearing my SB Choral Society President and soprano-in-the-chorus hats getting our Verdi Requiem behind us (which, as he’s already blogged about, was a smashing critical success, thank you very much) and as such all work on my blog got pushed to the back burner. Mea culpa!

Then before you could turn around and catch a breath, we were off on this trip to China.

We’ve never traveled in the East before and it has been something we were looking forward to doing, particularly as it involves food and nutrition. One big surprise has been the food. I came expecting rice and noodles and vegetables and not much in the way of protein and boy was I wrong.

I would have to say that rice or noodles have been a side dish, not a main dish, at most of our meals here. And there has been plenty of fish, poultry, beef, and pork…often all four at one meal.

For instance, the day we were in Jiang Men, we were treated to lunch at a Dim Sum restaurant. I was concerned that it would be all rice and dumplings with little tidbits of meat here and there.

The meal began with steamed stuff clams and fish cakes. Followed by a couple of dumplings

Pork Dumplings

Shrimp Dumplings

And the food just kept on coming.

Most of the food appeared in plates to be shared, placed on the giant lazy Susan always found in the center of a Chinese dining table. But everybody got his or her own ‘main dish’ which at this lunch was steak.

Steak with a brown sauce and fries

You’ll notice that there are a few fries artfully arranged (practically into a Chinese character) on the plate. That’s how many came with the steak. There were eight or nine (both lucky numbers in China–eight for wealth and nine for long life) fries about an inch and a half long on the plate. That’s it. Contrast that with the mountain of fries you’d get with a ’steak frite’ in the West.

Then a shared chicken dish that was just yummy…

Chicken with mushrooms and fresh cukes and tomatoes

and one of scallops and broccoli…

Scallops and Broccoli

…and a shared plate of corn and a purple sweet potato that is a locally grown specialty. I don’t eat much corn (though I love it) so I passed on the corn on the cob, but I tried a little of the purple sweet potato. Its consistency and taste is pretty much just like an orange one, but purple through and through, like a beet.

Corn and Purple Sweet Potatoes

And finally some little sweets, which I admit to having a taste of, just to try. They were actually quite hard to get into. The outer sticky rice ‘bread’ is soft and cold and really stretchy, a lot like the Ethiopian bread, called Injera, if you’ve ever had that. It was a struggle to get the thing open, but we weren’t alone; the locals struggled a bit, too. Inside was lightly sweet cream and bits of different kinds of fresh fruit, including watermelon.

Snowballs - Steamed Sticky Rice Sweets

Quite a feast…and for lunch, no less! Wait until Mike blogs about dinner that night. Sakes alive, what a meal!

Off to London this afternoon. Will be dining at The Fat Duck, so be prepared for a blow-by-blow on that experience.

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In the dining section of the NY Times last Wednesday, there was a somewhat alarming article by Kim Severson, titled: Showdown at the Coffee Shop (free but requires registration) detailing the entry of the new sweetener Truvia to the world of packet sweeteners.

Photo from NY Times Wednesday April 15, 2009

We’d already heard about its arrival at the Natural Foods Expo West show last March in Anaheim and had even sampled some of it. While I’m glad to see a natural alternative in the low-and-no calorie sweetener department, I’m personally not crazy about this one. Truvia is a blend of rebiana, an extract of stevia, and erythritol, a sugar alcohol. Thought there may be many good things about erythritol, to my taste buds it has a cold, metallic edge that I don’t enjoy. Others who don’t catch that taste twinge would perhaps feel differently about it and will love Truvia’s green packets in the sweetener caddy beside the blue, pink, and yellow ones.

Of course, by convention, for many many years, consumers have associated artificial sweeteners with a particular packet color: blue for aspartame products, pink for saccharine products, yellow for sucralose products, and green for stevia products. And it is related to this topic that I found the real eye-popper in this piece…the big news in my humble opinion…buried in the continuation of the article on page D5:

Consumers are loyal to their favorite sweetener, and to the color of its packet. Now manufacturers like Mr. Petray [CEO of Nutrasweet, which makes aspartame] are mixing up the color code, putting new sweetener combinations in the familiar pink, blue, and yellow.

This is news! And, in my mind, underhanded and sneaky and ethically fuzzy. The article goes on…

His challenge to Splenda combines aspartame and a touch of sugar in a yellow packet called NutraSweet Cane…Mr. Petray’s entry in the stevia wars is called Natural NutraSweet, which comes in a green packet, of course. And the company created a new saccharin-free pink packet, too. [The article didn't say what was in that pink packet, however, but since it's coming from NutraSweet we can be sure that one of the ingredients will be aspartame.]

The yellow packet, especially, is worrisome to me, since most low-carbers avoid aspartame because of some reports that suggest it might be particularly detrimental to the brains of people on a low carb eating plan. And this yellow imposter will have not only aspartame but sugar…real honest to Pete sugar! In the very yellow, pink, and green packets that many of us have come to trust do NOT contain aspartame, there will now be aspartame.

(For a longer discussion on the various sweeteners, see a previous blog post of mine here.)

Once these imposter packets make their way into the commercial market, consumers or diners will no longer be able to rely on colors alone to select their sweetener. We’ll all have to be careful label-readers to keep from being duped.

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Our local newspaper carried an article a few days ago by the McClatchy News Service’s Steve Schmaedeke that caught my eye: A whiff of luxury: Take Le Whif of inhalable chocolate.

Say what?! Inhalable chocolate?

Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

According to Mr. Schmadeke, David Edwards, the gentleman who invented inhalable insulin for diabetics, has now given us…well…a snort of chocolate. And he goes on to quote Mr. Edwards,

We believe really strongly that there’s a whole new way of eating–by aerosol.

Hmmmm. Like I need a ‘whole new way of eating’ chocolate. I’ve been known to ‘inhale’ chocolate in my time–I have admittedly downed a fair number more pieces of Mike’s mother’s fabulous fudge at Christmas in a short span of time than would be considered prudent–but never anything quite like this!

The chocolate particles (80 to 300 microns in size and about 1 calorie’s worth per puff) coat the inside of the mouth, so says the article. I wonder if you can actually taste it? I wonder if there’s any pleasure whatsoever to be derived from it? Any nutritive value from the catechins present in so minuscule an amount?

And if not, what’s the point?

We can all find out at the end of this month, according to the article, when Le Whif goes live on line, vending chocolate whiffs at about 50-cents a pop.

Ah, I can see it now… I’ll just have a doppio espresso and two of those chocolate whiffs, please.

Can inhalable buttered popcorn at the movies be far behind?

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As most long-time readers know, I have the honor to sing with the Santa Barbara Choral Society in the soprano section. For the last two years, we have had plans for the Verdi Requiem on our calendar for Spring 2009. Our concert will be May 16 and 17, just a few weeks from now.

Not too long ago, we learned of an astounding coincidence. May 17, 2009 happens to also be the Commemoration Day of the Liberation of the Nazi concentration camp, Terezin (Theresienstadt) near Prague.

Terezin was a ’show camp’ where visiting dignitaries from human rights organizations were brought to show them that the prisoners interred there were being treated well. Toward that end, the Nazis directed musicians and singers and artists toward this camp and permitted them to practice their arts for show. Later, most were deported to extermination camps, such as Auschwitz and Malthausen. At Terezin, there was a conductor, named Raphael Schaecter, who assembled a chorus and orchestra from among the prisoners. During the years of 1943 to 1944, Schaecter and his musicians performed the Verdi Requiem 16 times to uplift the hearts of their fellow prisoners and to amuse their captors, who thought it funny that a chorus of Jews would be singing a Christian funeral mass…for themselves.

This year on Terezin’s commemoration day, a chorus from America (the Berkshire Festival Chorus) will travel to Prague to perform the Verdi Requiem at the camp on May 17. On that same day, my chorus, Santa Barbara Choral Society, will be performing the same piece in Santa Barbara.

Once we learned of this amazing coincidence and began to discover more about the singers and the history of this piece of music in their lives, we determined to dedicate our performance to the memories of the singers of Terezin. Beautiful as the piece is (and it is achingly beautiful) it has taken on an entirely new meaning to our group. Each of us feels a connection to these singers and instrumentalists who under the most difficult of circumstances that life could throw at them found solace and even defiance of their captors in the music. Able to say through the Verdi’s score what they couldn’t say in words. For more on the history, click here.

Just today, a friend just sent me a link to an incredible essay by Karl Paulnack on this subject. Better than I ever could, this piece sums up why music matters and why it is desperately wrong to cut funding for music at a time as critical as this one in our country. Now, more than ever, we need music to feed and heal our souls.

If you’re anywhere near Santa Barbara that weekend, come to hear us at the Granada Theater!

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We just had a quick bite tonight at Dargan’s, our favorite Irish pub in Santa Barbara, where they’re already gearing up for St. Paddy’s Day and today’s paper was filled with recipes for everything Irish. There was a recipe for lamb stew, corned beef and cabbage, and Irish Coddle and a lengthy discourse on Guinness. Clearly, that day when everybody sports a shamrock and wishes they were Irish is just around the corner and with it another holiday to challenge a person’s low-carb commitment.

Actually, some Irish culinary traditions are pretty low-carb friendly–corned beef and cabbage, for instance. It’s that pile of the traditional Irish staple sitting next to the corned beef and cabbage that causes the problems for a low-carbing lover of St. Paddy’s Day. But substitute fauxtatoes for the potatoes by substituting Creamy Cauliflower Puree that I’ve posted about in another blog for the mash and you’re good to go.

Same with a meaty Irish stew. With a little low-carb sleight of hand you can pimp out the potatoes with a celery root substitute. When selecting a celery root, be sure it is moist and heavy for its size. If it is old and the least dried out it will be woody and awful when cooked.

Celery roots peel just like potatoes, but with considerably more effort. Once peeled, cut them up just as you would a potato, into a 1/2-inch dice. They are slightly tougher than a potato, but if you meet excessive resistance in the cutting (and your knife is not dull) it can indicate that the root is old. Old roots are woody and fibrous. And so will be the dish made from them. It’s like eating wood splinters when this happens, so select with care for freshness. You could also use cauliflower, cut into individual florets, in the stew, but in this application, it’s less potato-like.

Here’s my low-carb adapted crock pot version, just in time to celebrate the big day.

Luck o’ the Irish Stew
Serves 8

2 pounds lamb or beef, cut for stew into 1-inch chunks
1 large celery root, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1 medium sweet onion, peeled and sliced
2 large orange or red bell peppers, stems and seeds removed, cut into 1-inch pieces
3 stalks of celery, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
8 ounces beef or chicken broth
8 ounces Guinness (or substitute another 8 ounces broth)
2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup fresh parsley leaves (chopped just before serving)

1. In a 6-quart crock pot, combine the meat, celery root, onion, peppers, celery, Guinness and/or broth, and all seasonings, except parsley.
2. Stir well, cover, and cook on low about 7 to 8 hours, until meat is fork tender.
3. Just before serving, sprinkle on the fresh parsley to brighten the flavor.

Serve with a nice chewy Guinness (only about 15 grams of carb) or an icy cold pint of hard cider (Strongbow weighs in at only 12 grams per serving) and you’ve got a feast any leprechaun could love.

May the Luck o’ the Irish be with you this St. Paddy’s Day!

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Nothing says love on Valentine’s Day quite like sweets, particularly chocolate, which can make it a mine-field for the low-carb devotee. But here’s a solution that may surprise you: truffles!

My all-time favorite recipe for classic Bittersweet Chocolate Truffles comes from Alice Medrich’s wonderful book A Year in Chocolate: Four Seasons of Unforgettable Desserts(Warner Books 2001).

Click on the image of her book at left to find out more.

I sometimes make batches of these delicacies to take as a hostess gift to dinner parties instead of wine, since just about everybody loves a luscious chocolate truffle.

And besides, good cocoa is a health food (see here) filled with active flavinoid compounds, such as epicatechin, which according to some researchers may be protective against the development of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes.

But what about the sugar content?

I confess that I’ve always felt a little twinge of guilt, in light of my own dietary dictums, being the bearer of temptation by bringing truffles, assuming them to be too carby for anybody’s good. So one day last fall, I got out the recipe and ran it through my food processor nutritional calculator to see exactly what kind of damage I might actually be doing to my friends.

I was astonished when I discovered that these classic truffles, made exactly according to Ms. Medich’s recipe without any carb pimping on my part, had a mere 3 grams of carbohydrate each. Not nothing, but not much for something so decadent and satisfying. So I set about last December to make boxes of a couple of dozen Handmade Classic Truffles as Christmas gifts for many of our friends and family.

I intend to make another batch for Valentine’s Day, for there can be no greater calling than plying your love with good chocolate. If you’d like to join me, here’s my favorite recipe from Ms. Medrich’s most wonderful book. If you’re a chocolate lover, as I confess that I most definitely am, it’s one you may want to add to your cookbook library.

Bittersweet Chocolate Truffles
from Alice Medich, A Year in Chocolate
[with photos and commentary by me]
Makes about 30 bite-sized truffles

Ingredients
8 ounces bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped fine
6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) unsaltd butter, cut into small pieces
1 egg yolk, at room temperature
1/4 cup boiling water
1/3 cup unsweetened Dutch process cocoa powder

Equipment: Instant-read thermometer

To make the truffles, place the chocolate and butter in a 4- to 6-cup heatproof bowl set in a wide skillet of barely simmering water over low heat. Stir frequently until the chocolate and butter are completely melted and smooth.

Remove the bowl and set aside. Leave the skillet on low heat.

Place the egg yolk in a small bowl. Gradually whisk in the boiling water . Place the bowl in the skillet and stir constantly until the yolk mixture thickens slightly to the consistency of light cream and registers between 160 and 165 degrees F on an instant-read thermometer. [I have discovered that on a chilly day, it helps speed this process along to put a square of aluminum foil over the bowl while stirring.]

Remove from the skillet and scrape the yolk mixture immediately over the melted chocolate.

Stir gently, without whisking or beating, just until the egg is completely incorporated and the mixture is smooth. Pour through a fine strainer into a clean bowl. [I confess I skip this step for the sake of ease.] Cover and chill until firm, 2 hours or more.

To form the truffles, remove the truffle mixture from the refrigerator and allow it to soften about 30 minutes if the mixture is very hard. Pour cocoa into a pie plate.

Dip a melon baller or small spoon into a glass of hot water, wipe off the excess water, and scrape across the surface of the chilled truffle mixture to form a rough 1-inch ball. Pinch the truffle into shape with your fingers if necessary; it should not be perfectly round. [They're supposed to look something like the gnarly savory 'real' truffles that pigs root up under French oak trees.] Deposit the truffles into the cocoa [a few at a time.] Repeat with the remaining truffle mixture. Gently shake the pie plate to coat truffles with cocoa. [I usually roll them around a little bit with my fingertips to get them well covered and then pinch them gently into a rounder shape. Sometimes after they sit a bit, I give them an extra roll in the cocoa just for good measure.]

Store truffles, tightly covered and refrigerated, up to 2 weeks, or freeze up to 3 months.

Happy Valentine’s Day to all!

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As promised (by my darling husband) here is the recipe I have used for years for an authentic Spanish Andalusian Gazpacho. Mike proclaimed it difficult, which it really isn’t. Time consuming and in parts a pain in the keester, but not difficult. In the summer, when the tomatoes are at their peak, I use fresh tomatoes, but otherwise, the canned diced ones, particularly the fire roasted ones that are now available everywhere, are a tastier option.

Authentic Gazpacho Andaluz
Serves 6

For the Soup Base
3 pounds of ripe, red Roma or plum tomatoes, stemmed and quartered
(or 3 (14-ounce) cans of diced fire roasted tomatoes, drained)
1/2 large red bell pepper, seeded and coarsely chopped
1/4 large green bell pepper, seeded and coarsely chopped
1/2 large English (seedless) cucumber, cut into large chunks
1 clove finely chopped or pressed garlic
1 ounce lemon juice
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil (preferably Spanish)
1/3 cup sherry vinegar (not cooking sherry, sherry wine vinegar)
1/2 teaspoon sea salt, or to taste
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, or to taste

1. Place all ingredients into a blender or food processor and pulse to chop, then process until pretty smooth. You may have to do this in two batches depending on the size of your machine.
2. Refrigerate for at least 5 hours. Overnight is fine, too.
3. Remove from refrigerator and press the soup through a medium mesh sieve into a large bowl, using the back of a wooden spoon to extract every luscious drop from the pulp. Discard the pulp.
4. Taste and adjust seasonings, adding a bit more salt, pepper, or vinegar as desired.
5. Return the soup base to the refrigerator until ready to serve.

For the garnish
1 large red tomato, peeled, seeded, and diced small
1/2 large red bell pepper, seeded and diced small
1/2 large English (seedless) cucumber, peeled and diced small
1/2 red onion, peeled and diced small

1. Prepare the garnish vegetables, keeping each type separate, and refrigerate until serving.
2. Place a pile of each of the garnish vegetable onto a serving plate or tray to pass.

At serving time
1. Ladle about a cup of the gazpacho base into each bowl.
2. Pass the garnish tray to let each guest load up their soup as they’d like.

That’s the way we do it at Casa Eades, though there are many other also traditional garnishing options that we noted on our Spanish travels through Andalusia, such as tiny croutons, chopped up hard-boiled egg, fresh kernels of corn. Personally I don’t need anything but the fresh, cool, crunchy veggies we always use. On occasion, when I haven’t had enough cans of tomatoes, or the fresh ones didn’t have enough flavor and acidity, I have spiked it with organic V8 juice to perk up the tomato-y essence of it.

No matter how you make it, gazpacho Andaluz is the perfect low carb soup: piquant, refreshing, flavorful, and filled with lycopenes, antioxidants, and other phytochemicals.

Enjoy.

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As a follow-up to Mike’s wonderful post today about the Elephant and the Rider and the Warring Selves, here’s a little more food for thought on the subject.

An article appeared yesterday in the London Free Press about a new study (abstract free, full text not) purporting to show that female brains don’t as easily turn off the appetite signal when confronted with a favorite food (read: can’t as easily forget that there is a box of donuts in the breakroom) than those of their brethren.

Researchers, studying the mysteries of voluntary hunger suppression, were surprised when PET scans of fasted subjects–23 men and 23 women–presented with their favorite foods, showed marked gender differences. The ‘feeling’ or ‘emotional’ parts of the brains of all participants lit up like a Christmas tree on sight of the favored food. The subjects had been taught ‘cognitive inhibition’ suppression techniques to consciously quiet hunger that they were asked to employ during the test.

When men employed the techniques, they reported that their hunger did abate and the PET scan showed dimming of the activity in those previously-lit-up parts of the brain.

Not so with the ladies.

“There is something going on in the female…The signal is so much different…Even though the women said[my italics] they were less hungry when trying to inhibit their response to the food, their brains were still firing away in the regions that control the drive to eat,” Wang said.

But what does it all mean? Who knows (and the authors didn’t speculate). But I can…

Is it that the female brain is less capable of focusing on the ‘congnitive inhibition’ or are women’s brains, once focused, more complex machines with greater RAM and therefore less easily distracted? Does the difference spring from the theory of the polychronic female brain, versus the monochronic male one? The difference that, some would say, allows a mother to juggle many things at once: cook dinner, talk to her mother on the phone, help Joannie with her homework, keep an eye on 2-year-old Billy and the new puppy, change the baby’s diaper, and do a load of laundry almost simultaneously?

Maybe that polychronicity allowed the female subjects to keep the image of the warm donut in the backs of their minds, even while willing themselves with another part of the brain to backburner it…for now…and report less hunger. While the male brain, able perhaps to focus on only one thing at a time could either think about the donut or not. Maybe the male brain operates on a binary system that means if they choose to think about something else…poof!…thoughts of the donut vanish. Whereas the female brain may operate more like an iMac, capable of having dozens of windows up on the screen, with one application overlaying the other, all of them there and quickly accessible, but running silently behind the one in the forefront.

All pure speculation, of course, and just a few of a score of other plausible explanations for the difference. The study doesn’t address any of the whys, but it provides such intriguing fodder for future studies, they will surely follow in due course.

Thus, although I completely agree with my husband about Dr. Glasser’s theory in general, it may prove to be the case that we of the fairer sex are wired to have more trouble than our brothers at sublimating the desire for the warm donuts through simple distraction. That’s not to say we shouldn’t try to do so, just that it may be another of those inequalities/differences in the sexes that makes it a slightly tougher row to hoe…or in this case, donut to ignore…for us.

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This past New Year’s Eve, we had (as we often do) a number of friends over for dinner to ring in the new year. I had intended to post the menu, photos, and some recipes long before now, but life has been a bit hectic in our neck of the woods, with multiple projects with looming deadlines on my desk, so I apologize for my sporadic attention to this blog.

The New Year’s Eve plan involved dinner at 8 o’clock for a group of friends, with another two couples joining us for dessert and champagne after attending the Symphony Pops Concert earlier in the evening. We expected six for dinner, but one lost guest–who had never been to our home before, couldn’t find it, and didn’t have the correct phone number–and one sick guest reduced us to a smaller, but still very merry group.

Here’s the menu for the evening:

Caviar, Blinis, and Sour Cream
Roasted Yellow Pepper Consomme with Sundried Tomato Pesto
Seared Foie Gras with Sherry Reduction
Herbed Rack of Lamb
Roasted Baby Beets
Garlic-herb Cauliflower Puree
Field Greens
Epoisses with Currant Walnut Bread
Dessert Sampler, including:
Low-Carb Creme Brulee
Handmade Chocolate Truffles
Drunken Rubies
Mike’s Mom’s Fruit Cake Fingers

…and of course lots of champagne and vino throughout the evening.

While the foie gras was our holiday splurge (and worth every penny) the surprise star of the meal turned out to be the Yellow Pepper Consomme, deemed by our food-knowledgeable guests from France as ‘elegant.’ High praise, indeed, for a very simple soup, so I thought I’d share that one with you.

Yellow Pepper Consomme with Sundried Tomato Puree

Serves 4 to 6

1 jar roasted yellow peppers, drained, rinsed and any seeds removed (about 5 or 6 peppers)
1 clove garlic, peeled
2 (14 ounce) cans chicken broth with salt and spices*
dash cayenne pepper
Garnish: (1) 3-ounce jar of Bella Terra Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto**

1) To make the consomme, place all ingredients into a blender and puree well. (At this point you may refrigerate the consomme until you’re ready to serve it. A day actually helps the flavor.)
2) Place consomme in a saucepan, over a medium flame, and heat through.
3) At serving, ladle soup into bowls and center a teaspoonful of sun-dried tomato pesto in each bowl.

* if you cannot find broth with salt and spices, simply use low-salt chicken broth and add 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder, 1/4 teaspoon onion powder, 1/4 teaspoon black pepper.

** if you’d like to make your own pesto, it’s simplicity itself. In a food processor, place 1 jar of sun-dried tomatoes in oil, 1/4 cup pitted or sliced black olives, 1 handful fresh basil, 1 clove garlic (crushed), a dash of Tabasco, generous pinch of salt, pinch of pepper and blend. Stream in some good olive oil with the motor running until you’ve got a soft, pesto consistency.

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