#34....Sour Cherries and All
Ernie and I celebrated the 34th anniversary of the day we met yesterday. It was the day, long ago in 1981, when I gave up on his flirting abilities and introduced myself. Lord we were babies!
Owen kicked us out of the house--he felt we should do something on our own. We asked him why he wanted to get rid of us and he said that we are so perfect together that it's cute...he said "Well, you're like Garfunkel and Oates or Woodstock and Snoopy...you just fit together...so go out and do something together." I couldn't really argue after that so off we went. We felt like hitting antique shops but we're too broke, we thought about just going for a drive but in the end we were predictable and just headed to Fries and Peanuts and had a drink and got giggly.
It was lovely. I love being with that man. Still do. Thirty four years later.
We came home and Leo came downstairs to watch a movie with us before we slowly eased into the kitchen to cook. We had splurged and bought some gorgeous big mussels from Cheese and Crackers, as well as two pounds of Prince Edward Island mussels. I'd spent much of the morning looking up recipes and thinking about what to make with them. We ended up with seared mussels with tarragon-basil pesto and sour cherry gastrique with a mussel and pea saffron risotto. I think my feverish recipe planning had included bacon crumbles on the scallops but I forgot that.
I must say....the scallops were fantastic and I loved the tiny sharp sweetness of the gastrique on top...but the mussel risotto totally blew everything away!
I sort of based the risotto on this recipe. We sauteed some onion and garlic in olive oil, then added some white wine and tossed in the scallops. They just took a few minutes to steam, then we drained all the cooking liquid and added it to a cup or so of turkey stock I found in the freezer. Oh, and we threw in some saffron. We took the mussels out of the shells and set them aside. Later when we were ready to eat, we again sauteed some onion and maybe a shallot, I forget, added a cup of arborio rice and stirred it all to coat well. Then we started adding ladle after ladle of the mussel/turkey broth until it was creamy and just cooked, and added the mussels back in as well as some peas. Then I salt and peppered the scallops, seared them in a cast iron pan just for a minute and set them on the side of the risotto, surrounded it all with a bit of tarragon-basil-pecan pesto and put just a few drop of the sour cherry gastrique (that we'd made earlier) on top. I'm lousy with plating things but it still looked pretty damn good. And the expensive scallops were great...they really were....but it was the $3 per pound mussels that I'll be making again!
my messy, but delicious, plate...
The sour cherries had been sitting in my freezer since a trip to Beachy's in Arthur a few months back. We pulled them out of the freezer and found they had been pitted...yay! The juice from the defrosted juice was so good I wanted to drink a gallon. Instead I set aside about a cup of it with a handful of cherries for the gastrique. I'd never made a gastrique before. The first time I tried to carmelize the sugar it all crystalized but the second batch worked well. I used a half cup of sugar, melted it until it had lots of bubbles...not too carmelized because I was paranoid about the crystalizing thing. Then I poured in an equal amount of cidar vinegar and cooked it for a bit....then added the cherries and juice and cooked it down till it was thickened a bit.
I had lots of cherries left so we made Cherry-Orange Bourbon and a cherry clafoutis. We haven't even tried the clafoutis yet as we were too full of mussels and scallops to eat dessert. It looks pretty gorgeous though. I will let you know....
Here are the cherries in front of a blue glass bowl full of paperwhite bulbs. It was perfect full of chocolate treats when you gave it to us Amy Thompson....but it's the perfect for my paperwhites too!