Saturday night meal - Feb 25th

Another flavour experimenting meal:

Pre dinner nibbles:

1. Potato crisps with Brie gel, vanilla infused olive oil and ground coffee.
This was good.  I did it last week but used Pringles then.  They allowed a more uniform presentation.  Chips are a bit hit or miss at far as size and shape goes.

2. Beetroot chips with Brie gel, mashed walnuts and fresh fig.
Really nice but hindered a bit but the beet root chips - they were all very small.

Starter

Had eight for dinner so opted not to do the poached eggs but still wanted to do the asparagus and liquorice.  So did asparagus, smoked salmon, cream cheese and liquorice, based on the fact that dill is often paired with salmon and has aniseed flavours.  Worked well.

Main:

Chicken and strawberry salad.  Successively layered on the plate: baby spinach, sliced avocado, sliced bbq-ed chicken (still warm), sliced strawberries, finely sliced celery, finely diced red onion.  Dressed with a strawberry vinagrette.

Dessert:

Homemade gingerbread, fresh yellow nectarines, rum sauce, vanilla ice-cream.
One of the guests brought a very pleasant muscat that went very well with the dessert.

With coffee:

Dark chocolate and cumin truffles.  (What sort of fool picks a 38deg day to make truffles?  Oh.)

Having a lot of fun playing with the flavour matching thing at the moment.
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