Several images are from a dinner in December at Benu. A few are from recent meals at Monsieur Benjamin and Mama Ji’s. The rest are scenes from our kitchen.
As usual, click a picture on the mosaic for a larger-sized version.
Broccoli rabe with garlic and lemon.
Pickled long beans with pork and chile peppers.
Spicy fermented bean paste with tomato, served with crudités.
Left: Pickled crosnes and pearl onion. Right: XO sauce, house-made soy sauce.
Butter lettuce salad, French breakfast radishes, chervil.
Grilled veal short ribs, seasoned with sesame seed, perilla seed and pine nuts.
Barbecued quail from Wolfe Ranch.
Marinated mussel, root vegetables.
Ginkgo flour “tortilla”, matsutake mushroom, pine needles, 10 year old aged pine syrup.
Omija sorbet, olive oil
Monkfish liver steamed in rice wine, with toasted seaweed and chili.
Chicken wing stuffed with abalone and abalone liver mousse.
Milk pudding, salted caramel sauce, peat
Sauternes.
Endive salad with walnuts, mustard vinaigrette and apple.
Caviar with hand-pressed sesame oil, sesame leaf and daikon.
Quail liver mousse, au jus, black truffles.
Steamed Japonica rice with powdered scallion.
Pernil – Puerto Rican-style roast pork.
Xiao long bao with lobster coral, house-made soy sauce, vinegar.
Salted walnuts, dried persimmons, sweet rice cakes
Chicken meatballs with ricotta and lemon.
Sea urchin marinated in fermented crab sauce, with thinly sliced celtuce
Blood sausage, sweet rice, squid ink, shiso.
Whipped ricotta cheese, chestnut honey, chopped pistachio nuts.
Shrimp tempura, jellyfish, seaweed
Chrysanthemum leaf and scallion salad.
Coconut chiffon cake
“Shark fin” soup – Dungeness crab, ham, egg white and black truffles.
Chicken with tree ears and Chinese mushrooms in a clay pot.
Asian pear and Napa cabbage kimchi.
Arctic char amandine, haricots verts, brown butter.
Thousand year old quail egg, cabbage juice, ginger.
Black truffle steamed bun. Basically a play on Peking duck – stuff the bun with quail, top with condiments and enjoy.
Anchovies and parsley.
Short ribs.
Butter with orange blossom honey and ginseng. Not shown are some sprouted grain rolls.
Kohlrabi kimchi.
I’ve never committed to a regular blog posting schedule in the nearly 13 years this blog has been in existence, but I suppose I should start doing that, no? That should be my New Year’s resolution…or one of them, anyway.
So here’s to a beginning of sorts.
