Happy Mom's Day

Yeah so I know that I didn’t post at all last week. I’ve been finding that recently I’ve actually spent more time experimenting with food than critiquing/writing about it. I had a night last week where I was up till 2 am making sausage. I also had a night where I ran into a friend at around midnight when I was running to the grocery store to buy more sugar for my most recent pickling project. My liquor infusion project has also been a huge hit so far. Although, now the people who compliment my cooking (I was at a BBQ on Saturday) tend to be a lot more drunk due to the fact that the melon vodka I made was extremely smooth and delicious.

After a week of neglecting the blog I’ve decided to make a glorious return. Yesterday was mother’s day, so you can bet that I spent the majority of my day cooking for mom.

I started off with a brunch/breakfast of ‘seriously good’ Violet Hill Farm bacon, a fruit salad of orange, grapefruit, blackberries and honeydew (I was using the rind for infusing more booze) and my mom’s favorite—chocolate and strawberry pancakes.

I spent my afternoon going to the gym, making more melon voda, perfecting by maple bacon walnut Bourbon and trying my hand at rosemary and lavender vodka.

Then I started on a four course mother’s day dinner.

The first course was my own citrus cured arctic char tartare (as inspired by Gramercy Tavern) with radish sprouts, grapefruit, orange, and celery brunoise. The dish looked amazing and even tasted good as well. I do, however, need to work on my fish butchering skills.


The second course was an experiment that resulted from the presence of a couple of new ingredients and my dad’s desire to fry stuff. I made a fiddlehead fern ‘tempura’ served over Chinese Forbidden Rice (which I love) pan roasted oyster mushrooms, shaved asparagus and lemon. Even though this was really a last minute hodgepodge of things it was actually pretty good. We all agreed that fiddlehead tempura is pretty tasty.


The final savor course was something I’ve done several times before—arctic char (I had bought the whole fish and needed to use it) over asparagus, ramps, favas and carrots with crème fraiche and mustard.

Finally, the light dessert consisted of shaved honeydew, AMAZING farmer;s market raspberries, and a Muscat granite.



Happy Mother’s day everyone, I hope you all cooked for your mom’s as well.