Catching up….

What with long power failures, travels and visitors, we’ve fallen behind with our blogging.  The topic here is food…beginning with the dinner guests prepared for us here at Thistle Hill.

To explain:  we asked Rappahannock’s wonderful chef, Sylvie Rowand, to stage a dinner here for friends in the style of her native Reunion, a French island in the remote Indian Ocean.  Sylvie combines her French heritage with flavors of other populations on the island: Asian and African.

But to make it a bit more entertaining, we asked Sylvie to add another of her specialties:  a cooking class.  Our kitchen is small so we spilled over into the adjoining breakfast room to do the chopping…and there was a lot!

You will note in the left hand picture I was serious about this, wearing my “Inn at Little Washington” apron.  Sylvie is giving the opening lecture, a combination of what we’re about to prepare plus geography and the history of her island.  I’m flanked by Lindsay Sagstuen and Gisela Volkert.  In the next picture John Dibble is in the yellow apron.  And finally, the result: Kurt Volkert isn’t waiting for the photo session to end.

The dinner was delicious and achieved despite constant power outages which left us with just one burner at times and never an oven.  Actually, it was, according to Sylvie,  a more traditional preparation.

The menu included Spring Rolls, Yellow Rice, Lemon and Onion Salad, Sauteed Chayote, Ginger Carrot Beef and a Crepe with Peachs and Blackberry Coulis.

So the dinner was truly a special experience and no more expensive than a meal in a fine restaurant.  Plus we had something to talk about instead of politics!

Moving to another subject:  I mentioned recently reading a cooking tip by a well-known Washington chef.  He sautes his steaks in butter briefly before putting them on the grill.  We like to put a dollop of butter on our meat at the very end of cooking, but this worked well, too.  You’ll have to decide whether it’s worth the extra step and extra pan to clean.

Finally, a grass fed cookbook:  by a chef who raises grass fed meat.  It gets a warm review from another grass fed farmer.  Read about it at the link:

http://www.goodfoodneighborhood.org/book-review-pure-beef-lynne-curry/