CELEBRATE WITH PASSION!
Maybe a feast is called for! Or not! That's true whether in 1800's France being served roasted peacock by waiters on horseback or today grabbing some Wagyu ribeye and Cheetos and call it a meal
Over the time I knew chef Jean Claude Tindillier, I was regaled with crazy food stories. A roaming cherry picker went from farm to farm each fall in small towns south of Paris not only to pick but also to put up a 55-gallon drum of cherry liquor for each farmer’s family to enjoy over the year until the next cherry-picking season arrived. Sometime in the mid-19th century, there was a circus-like dinner with Jean Claude and his other chef buddies in some high-cooking-or-drinking society that began at 8 a.m. —yup, a celebratory dinner starting in the morning! Courses were delivered —astoundingly!— to the dining room’s tables on massive silver trays held aloft by servers on horseback. All the rest of the details of that morning-to-afternoon-to-who-knows-when soiree are lost to memory. My friend’s stories could only have been zanier had he been talking about the earliest days of wine making about 6,000 BC, not to mention describing the foods eaten then.
A feast can be eaten in a restaurant. I was wont to give Jean Claude —chef at Chouette in Wayzata, Minn., at that time— a certain amount for the cost of an anniversary meal, for example. Then, I told him to “surprise us.” Turnabout being fair play, I decided to “surprise him” once with an invite to my home for a celebratory meal that I’d cook. What was I thinking? Me cook for him! Well, we were good friends . . . and I probably could come up with something halfway presentable. It was game on! As I recall I served some kind of salad with seafood in it. The rest, I’ve no recollection of. But, given the chance, I’d eagerly ask a notable French chef for dinner again.
FIRST COURSE
Canape’s of smoked salmon, seaweed, dungeness crab, and scrambled eggs served with Donkey & Goat “The Gadabout” white California wine.
SECOND COURSE
MAIN COURSE
A SOUVENIR
PLEASE ANSWER ONE SIMPLE QUESTION . . . WITH DETAILS
ON VALENTINE’S DAY Did you dine out? Did you do takeout? Did you cook in? Did you buy chocolate . . . or flowers? Did you do nothing —nothing!— on that historic, decidedly romantic day?
We dined at Scarpas, a fine restaurant in Boca Grande, FL. Two other couples celebrated with us, the Slacks and the Parsons. I ordered the Snapper Milanese
while my wife, Maze, ordered the veal cannelloni. The snapper was by far the best selection, and we shared a Caesar salad with special house made dressing.
The evening was rich in conversation as we shared what the glue was that held each of us together for almost 50 years.
I did nothing this year but have cooked or prepared special meals in the past just for the fun of it.