Birthday Dinner, the big 3-0
This is it… I guess I’m officially grown up now… I’ve turned 30! (Oh, the horror.) Of course I got pretty much nothing but toys: iPod touch, Nintendo Wii, Garmin Forerunner, a Manfrotto Super Clamp, and some board games.
To celebrate we had family and a few friends over for a nice dinner Saturday night. At least it turned out very well, as it should, I had been doing food related stuff (shopping, prepping, cooking) for most of Friday and all of Saturday. The menu was a variation on the traditional danish suppe, steg og is or literally soup, steak, and ice cream.
Update: Now with recipes.
We started with an Asparagus Velouté which is my brother’s self-professed favorite soup. The soup is somewhat time consuming to make because you have to first prepare a consommé which is a very light clear soup. Only then can the real preparation start. The soup tasted as good as I remember it, and was served with lightly steamed baby asparagus, of course laid out like a Fleur-de-lis.
Then we had a veal rump steak which was roasted in the oven at 180 centigrade for 45 minutes (and then rested for 15). I had asked the butcher for the best beef or veal steak based on taste and tenderness, and followed his instructions to the letter, or rather, Susan did. The steak was served with baked potato and pea cupcakes, butter blanched spring onions and carrots rolled in a steamed savoy cabbage leaf, and an espagnole based sauce.
We rounded off the feast with a very rich chocolate mousse served on a raspberry sauce/puree with a cranberry sorbet from ParadIS. The ice cream was a plan B since our lemon mousse had failed to set, note to self: when scaling up a recipe it is important to look at the scaled up measures when adding stiffening agent to the mixture… However, the sorbet went really well with the fluffy almost cake-like mousse, and offset the richness perfectly.
All in all it was a resounding success. The soup was rich and creamy, the meat was as tender and flavorful as the butcher had promised, and the chocolate mousse was to die for. Of course, I have to try and make the lemon mousse some other time and see how it turns out, it really was quite simple.
I have also promised to share the recipe for the chocolate mousse, so I will add that below when I get home. I will also add the lemon mousse recipe as people didn’t get to taste it.
Recipes
Chocolate Mousse
Ingredients:
150 g plain (dark) chocolate
75 g butter
2 large egg yolks
3 egg whites
a pinch of salt
25 g caster (superfine) sugar
1 tsp. vanilla-flavored sugar
Directions:
Melt chocolate in a bain marie, remove from the heat and add butter. When the mixture is very smooth, quickly blend in the egg yolks. Whisk the egg whites with a pinch of salt until very stiff, then whisk in the sugars. Carefully mix the chocolate preparation with the whisked egg whites, using a wooden spatula. Pour into a dish and chill for at least 12 hours.
Lemon Mousse
Ingredients:
2 egg yolks
5 tbsp. sugar
2 tbsp. cornflour (cornstarch)
6 limes
2 lemons
2 egg whites
Directions:
Beat together egg yolks and sugar. When the mixture is foamy, add the cornflour and then the heated juice of the limes and lemons. Bring the mixture to the boil stirring all the time. Stiffly whisk the egg whites and fold into the mixture. Pour this mousse into remkin dishes and serve chilled, for example with a salad of blood oranges and pink grapefruit.