Fresh, zingy richness in a clear glass

The four Velveteers are back! After our Red-Velvet cakes we come back to you with a new adventure into our fridges, grocery stores and creative minds.
This time it took us quite a few emails before we could agree on what to propose you. At the end we settled for a Verrine.
What is that?? You might say; that is simply a layered dish prepared into a transparent glass so to admire the alternation of its colors and textures and entice our tasting experience. To make the challenge more interesting we decided to propose each an ingredient to keep secret till the day when they were disclosed all together to the others. Aparna required us to include a cheese of any kind, Asha went for zucchini or squash, Pam chose salmon and I threw in chocolate (yeah I know, I like to make things difficult).

So, let’s see what we have on hands. Zucchini have two major qualities to them: they have a lovely crunchy bite when raw and they get sweet when cooked long enough. To make the things even, I decided to use them two ways: creamy and crunchy.
As salmon I chose to use the smoked one and it is mainly salty, rich and meaty.
The flavors did work for me from the starting; the tricky part was in choosing a proper cheese that will stand out balancing the saltiness of the salmon and the sweetness of the zucchini. At the end, I chose to use Gorgonzola with its saltiness and slight bitterness.
Chocolate was naturally to be dark for me but… when pondering on the juxtaposition of the different layers, the possibility to use milk chocolate came around.

To link the various components I had my spice rack on hand.
All this thinking and pondering brought to life my:

Smoked salmon verrine with zucchini-duo, a Gorgonzola mornay sauce and peppery chocolate shards.

TGRWT #18: Plum and blue cheese: Reconstructed Plum Tatin with Blue Cheese Butterscotch sauce and Lavender

The food blogging event “They Go Really Well Together” (TGRWT) was initiated by Martin of the Khymos.org blog in April 2007 to explore unusual flavour pairings suggested by the theory of the key odorants.
As we know, each food has a specific aroma and taste; this means that they release chemical compounds that either fly off to our nose (generating then their aroma) or they are detected directly by our taste buds (creating then their taste). These compounds are called odorant compounds and create all the fine nuances often found for instance, in wines or teas.
Successful food combinations have fascinated chefs since ever since no real scientific or objective reason has ever been found supporting this or that pairing. Lately a new theory has been proposed that hopes to shed some light onto this topic: if two foods share one or more key (major) odorants it might be that they go well together and perhaps even complement each other.
Every month, in order to test this theory a couple of ingredients are chosen, presented in a blog and given to the public to test via the use of new or already established recipes.
This month has been the turn of Aidan of “Aidan Brooks: Trainee Chef” blog to make the choice and this was: Plums and Blue Cheese.

This is my trial in exploiting this pairing in a dessert dish:
Reconstructed Plum Tatin with Blue Cheese Butterscotch sauce and Lavender.

Dinner Experience: Restaurant Basilico, Bonn

Tonight was a special night. A very good friend of mine invited me and other four friends out for dinner. She chose the Basilico restaurant by the Hotel Dorint in Venusberg, Bonn.
The hotel is situated in a great region around Bonn. High on the hill of Venusberg, surrounded by woods (and hospitals) the Dorint hotel has a terrace with a great look over the city of Bonn and the Rhine river.
The outside of the building reminded me of a mountain chalet; quite a different feeling from the marble and alabaster covered lobby. The restaurant has gone a restyling lately and the new look is quite appealing with its basil green wall, dark wood furniture and big copper light fixture on the roof.

When we arrived, we were greeted by our maître at the reception and he escorted us to the best table on the terrace. We could look directly at the city without being disturbed by the gorgeous trees.
Once sat down, we started choosing our meal (I have to stress that I do not remember the exact name of the dishes, so what I will write as such is based on what I had on the plate).