Tuesday 2 February 2010

Last Night's Formal Hall 01/02/

Last Night's Formal Hall menu was a combination of recipes from the Geronimo Restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Geronimo has won various awards and has a 4-star AAA rating (the AAA is the equivalent of the AA in the UK). We purchased their cookbook about three weeks ago and this is the first time we've tried the recipes.
We started the dinner with an amuse bouche of:
Vodka Sorbet
Creme fraiche and Caviar
This sorbet was flavoured with lemon and served with cucumber, sweet onion, creme fraiche and caviar!
Following the amuse bouche we served:
English Cotswold Cheddar and Cauliflower Bisque
This type of soup is not really my 'cup of tea' but hopefully everyone enjoyed it.
After the bisque we had grilled pork with Prosciutto, capers, sweet potato flan and thyme scented courgettes. The sweet potato flan was similar to Dauphinoise potatoes, but set with egg instead of cream.
Below is a good photo of Sara, Darina and Ioana serving up the main course. This great trio make up 3 of our 4 female chefs.
To finish the meal we served lemon semifreddo with a basil seed sauce. Semifreddo is a frozen mousse and has a lighter texture than ice cream. The sweet sauce if garnished with basil seeds soaked in syrup until they've plumped-up. Basil seeds are widely used in Asia for sweets and cold drinks.
We hope you had a good dinner!

4 comments:

  1. This looks absolutely delicious - as Pembroke formals always are - though I wish you'd photograph the veggie choices as well, as I'd love to see how they turn out!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I went to formal on Satuday night and the food was delicious, as it has been throughout the year. I think that the meat in pembroke formals has tasted great this year.

    Whilst the food is consistently great tasting, I also regularly come out of formal still feeling hungry, and having spoken to other people, I know they sometimes feel the same. I am not suggesting that you increase the portions of meat, as this would increase the cost of formal. Rather, I find portions of vegetables and potato in formal are often fairly small. Presumably it would be fairly cheap to simply increase the amount of potatoes or other cheaper filling food, so that formal food would not only taste delicious, but also fill you up. Would it be possible to have more potatoes and veg in Pembroke formals?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Came for this dinner - was absolutely wonderful! Great opener, wonderful bisque (especially the crouton), pork was nicely flavoured and a good bit of meat, the flan was... interesting.

    Dessert mousse was very well set off by the peel - we were wondering what the seeds were! Great service too = some very impressed guests. Brilliant!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Fantastic pudding, enjoyable amuse bouche and a tasty, if a little odd, bisque. Vegetarian main appeared to be flan x 3 covered with salsa... far less satisfactory!

    ReplyDelete