Estación Liceu

New Year's Eve

For New Year's Eve, we decided to stay in and do some cooking; on the menu was Salmon and Rice Wrapped in Puff Pastry with Dill Sauce, roasted asparagus, and Bittersweet Chocolate Soufflé with Earl Grey Custard.

As I had posted before, I had to make my own crème fraîche for the dill sauce and it seemed to turn out just fine. I realized, however, that the salmon recipe simply called for plain rice cooked with a bit of leek and not risotto (as was in my head for some reason). Upon reading the reviews, we decided we needed to make risotto or the dish might be too bland. We based ours loosely off of Alton Brown's recipe and it was really, really good. I loved the taste of the white wine in it.

With the risotto ready, it was time to assemble our salmon and rice packets; this was when disaster struck. Basically, we sucked at handling the puff pastry and if you are my Flickr friend, you can see a photo of when paper towels and pastry combine. I fought it for awhile but finally conceded that we would just have to do the salmon and risotto separately :-(



It was actually just fine but since I had had high hopes for the pastry, well, I was kinda bummed. The sauce was good but with the potency of the risotto, it was kinda lost.

My spirits were raised with the dessert, though. Cooking the Earl Grey custard was thrilling because anytime I can cook with tea, it's always enjoyable. The problem was that I had used tea bags, as the recipe recommended. Of course tea bags are filled with tea dust and not tea leaves so Austin found ourselves in a bit of a pinch when we were trying to strain the cream. We ended up using a wonderful little device that Bad Z had given me for my birthday to make loose tea right in the mug.

The soufflé itself wasn't bad to make and we were especially appreciative of the Cuisinart food processor that we got for our wedding when it came to chopping the chocolate.



The finished product was amazing and the flavor for the tea really came through, delighting me. Austin, not so much the tea drinker, said he would have preferred something that had a more coffee-like flavor but he thoroughly enjoyed the dessert.

Then we stayed up until midnight, sipping champagne (note the small "c"); I love bubbly. It was a perfect end to 2006.

posted by Kelly @ 8:05 a. m.