Have you gone completely insane like me? Do you keep your sourdough starter on your counter in two separate containers that you’ve affectionately named Toby and Sassafras? Are you constantly in search of things to do with the starter, to the point that this week you’ve tucked it into chocolate cake and stew and next up you’re thinking of building a sourdough car?

I’m guessing probably not, which is why I need an intervention. Like stat. It’s really bad, people. I pet my starters when I feed them. I coo at them. My husband had to stop me from bringing Sassafras into bed the other night. I was worried she’d get too cold in the kitchen. Read more

*This post is an entry for Foodbuzz’ Project Food Blog. The prompt: host a luxury dinner party.  If you like it, vote for it using the widget on the sidebar starting Monday 10/4-Thursday 10/7. I would like to thank my guinea pigs guests- Jamie, Robert and Patrick, Ethan and Efrain, and my stellar husband, Jonas.  They gamely got in fancy dress, played along, and brought their A-game.

When I think of luxury I think of hedonism, bacchanalia and excess. Studio 54, in its halcyon days, was the earthly embodiment.  Steve Rubell, the flamboyant proprietor of the club, knew a thing or two about luxury.  Every night, hundreds of people lined up outside the velvet ropes of Studio 54 clamoring for admission into an enchanted world. Rubell hand-picked a select few to come in and take part in the madness. He called it mixing a salad- the art of acheiving perfect blend of black, white, gay and straight, celebrity and commoner in order to make the club sing and rumors fly.

The infamous disco breathed life into bohemian society for a brief moment in time in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s before it lost its luster in an Icarus-like plunge from grace. Studio 54’s mystique was, and still is, unparalleled. Many say that no one will ever come close to recreating the magic that was Studio 54. I was just a wee sprite during the dog days of disco, but the era is particularly poignant for me because I feel it speaks volumes about our country’s rampant obsession with excess.  We are a young country that sometimes acts like a spoiled child with our constant aspiration for more. Studio 54 is a good lesson in the fact that the pursuit of excess often leads to a fiery fall.

I cannot help but draw a parallel to our current economic crisis and the factors leading up to it. Luxury is not an altogether sustainable concept, although we can enjoy it in moderation now and again. The luxury displayed in this post is meant as a whimsical interpretation of the perils of excess. The food resembles drugs that were taken during the disco days, albeit in a much safer form factor. If you must have pills and needles, why not make them from things like pomegranate seeds and pea puree instead? It’s safer, more sustainable, and I daresay more delicious.

I presented all of the food for this feast using non-traditional serveware.  I gave a lot of thought to the party as a whole, and I decided I wanted to foster an intimate, cavalier approach to both the food and guest interactions. By forcing people to use their hands or get close to the food in other ways, I was able to disarm them and thus set a thought-provoking tone for the meal.

During the kiss kiss/can I get you a glass of wine/oh my god I love your outfit portion of the evening, I presented my lovelies with a mozzarella balloon amuse bouche. I will go into greater detail about how to make mozzarella balloons in a full-feature post, but suffice it to say they are one of the best uses of cheese curd I can possibly imagine. I filled these with foam made from tomato water and served them on a bed of red basil and pea shoots.

Anyone lucky enough to gain entrance into Studio 54 will undoubtedly remember the club’s logo, The Man in the Moon (with Cocaine Spoon). It was a piece of movable art- essentially a giant moon and animated spoon made to careen into one another throughout the night. It was not mechanized; rather, two employees were stationed under the moon and spoon whose sole job was to move the iconic artwork via rope and pulley.

Foie Gras Powder- the reserve stash

I knew I needed to represent the famous logo, so I chose to do it with a piece of culinary art.  I made a bi-layered gelee of watermelon and sauternes then cut it into moon shapes. For the spoons, I dehydrated pears sliced in spoon shapes.

The piece de résistance of the dish, however, is the foie gras powder. It is essentially rendered foie gras that I powdered using a molecular gastronomy technique. It is sofa-king good, each of my six guests were veritably licking it off the mirror on which I served it. I had to bring out backup foie powder just to appease everyone’s craving.

Throughout the meal, diners had the option to take an inter- ‘lude consisting of red pills (pomegranate seeds), green pills (chardonnay grapes) or blue pills (corinth grapes).  By the end of the meal, the pills were gone, if this gives you any indication as to what a raucous bunch I hosted.

Lest anyone need to satisfy their pyromaniacal tendencies or soothe an oral fixation, I provided “cigarettes” and “matches”- both edible. The cigarettes are a Turkish delight called borek I discovered while researching for this post. Mine consist of feta and pea vines rolled in phyllo and they are immeasurably good in their simplicity. They certainly sated my desire to put something long and slender into my mouth- perhaps the smokers amongst you will give them a go.

I fashioned the matches from mandolined potatoes dipped in crème fraiche and paprika. While they may not be lighting any real fires anytime soon, they certainly sent tantalizing sparks to my tastebuds.

The intermezzo consisted of pea and mint puree served heroin chic. Guests were invited to go back for seconds by plunging their syringes into the bowl of a candlelit large spoon filled with puree.

In keeping with heady decadence, we decided to have dessert before the main course. I created blancmange pyramids of bicerin chocolate, cardamom and gianduja, presented them on oversized knives and dappled them with edible 14 karat gold. They left us piqued to the point of toe-clenching and knife-licking, but alas- the final course saved the day.

Since I had to render a ton of fat to make my foie gras powder, I also needed to find a use for all that luscious foie. I elected to get crazy-lavish and make gravy with it, and when I think of gravy, it’s only natural that I also think of poutine. The brilliant tie-in with poutine and Studio 54 is that happy revelers would pour out of the club at sunrise starving for breakfast and they’d find themselves at diners ordering what they referred to as “disco fries”- aka poutine. This little factoid is so awesometastic I had to include poutine on my menu, no? I bedazzled it with foie gravy and used Okinawan purple sweet potatoes for the fries.

After dinner, we slipped on our dancing shoes and did the Hustle to Patrick’s expertly-chosen Studio 54-era playlist (he is the only guest among us who had actually been to the real Studio 54 in its heyday).  We also climbed on the bubble chair, got super silly with slang flashcards and exhibited budding ninja skills with Samurai practice swords.  Indeed, it was a night to remember, and since they weren’t real drugs, we feel fabulous enough today to do the whole thing again tonight.  The moral of today’s tale? Don’t do drugs, do disco (and if you want luxury, eat it- it’ll cost you a lot less than a mortgage you can’t afford or a staggering loss of brain cells).

Never one to jump on the latest baking trend, you can imagine my surprise when I found myself unable to shake the concept of engineering a croquembouche.  Let’s start by answering the question, what is a croquembouche.  It’s essentially a tower of profiteroles glued together with caramel, often drizzled in chocolate, spun sugar, or all manner of fancy schmancy décor.  Not my type of thing. I like contemporary solid lines, bold colors, no frills.  So why can’t I get the damn thing out of my head? I’ve been making pate au choux with which to turn into profiteroles all summer, so I suppose architecting the croquembouche was the next inevitable step.  The problem is that I didn’t fully execute my vision since I only baked a measly 21 pate au choux, and what kind of tower can you really construct with only 21 building blocks?  So what that means is that this project is incomplete and must be revisited soon, at a time when I can whip up at least twice that many and construct my dream Barbie mansion from tiny pastry balls.

Knowing myself and my proclivity to take a perfectly good, classic thing and turn it all akimbo, I figured a classic croquembouche just wouldn’t do.  This is when I remembered seeing a method for turning foie gras into Chantilly crème recently.  Why not do semi-savory choux and fill them with goosey-oozy liver-y goodness then drizzle the whole thing in maple-balsamic reduction made to look like chocolate syrup? Yes, genius. Pure, diabolical, evil genius.  I considered not telling my lucky-number-13 guests that they would in fact be masticating goose livers rather than benign cream, but a vegetarian in our midst guilted me into full-disclosure.  I needn’t have bothered warning people, it seems. They well and truly were little bites of The Rapture. People popped them like it was 1974 and they were disco queens slamming back ‘ludes, so I’m pretty sure they needed no introduction after all.

To put the whole thing together I started with a good, sturdy batch of pate au choux.  Whilst my piped lovelies were puffing up in the oven, I contemplated the Foie Chantilly.  I did a bunch of internet research on how to fluff up the foie, and settled on mixing it with heated cream in a food processor for a few moments to sufficiently blend it. Then I passed it through a sieve into a mixing bowl over ice and proceeded to hand whisk it to stiff peaks.  In terms of quantity, for five ounces of foie, I used ¾ c heavy cream, a pinch of salt, and two tablespoons of superfine or caster sugar.  I heated the cream, sugar, and salt together in a heavy saucepan whilst I chopped the foie into ½” cubes and set reserved them in the food processor. Working quickly, once the cream was just nearing the boiling point, I added it to the foie and whirred it for ten seconds. I immediately passed it through the sieve and into the waiting chilled mixing bowl. It’s important to get it cool quickly so that it will whip properly.  I bet a pacojet would have been a really cool toy to employ for the whipping process, but I’ve got an official moratorium on kitchen gadgets here in the Salty Seattle household thanks to my evil husbandJ Once I whipped and chilled my cream and the pate au choux were cool, I piped each pastry full of a sufficient amount of choux using a star tip.  At this point I had savory profiteroles awaiting their drizzled fate.

For the sauce, I simply reduced equal parts balsamic and maple syrup in a small saucepan until it reached the consistency of thick molasses.  I then cooled it and dipped the butt ends of the profiteroles in the syrup to use as a binding agent.  I stacked a meager tower, though mark my words, this is only the beginning. My experimenting is far from finito.  In the meantime, enjoy this mini-tower knowing that I’ve created a monster in myself and I likely won’t stop until I construct a croquembouche the size of Frankenstein. And they make a movie about it.