trick or treat and mother sauces

Halloween weekend…a time for an overindulgence of sweets...sexy, provocative costumes... tricks and treats.

For me, it was the weekend of an 80-year-old. Halloween night, a group of us went to Uncle Julio's to fill our Tex-Mex cravings. Megan and I shared veggie fajitas with portabellos, peppers, onions and guacamole and sipped sangria-swirled margaritas. Halloween night ended up with a midnight bedtime and work all day Saturday.

The following evening, we decided to try Mac’s on 7th in Montgomery Plaza for dinner. Ignoring the mediocre lunch I’d had there three weeks prior, I thought the dinner menu might be a different story. We started with glasses of Pinot Grigio and the blue crab claws with some sort of citrus butter. Admittedly a crab snob, they were pretty tasty.

For my entrée, I chose the chimichurri shrimp with steamed rice and a “salsa fresco”. The shrimp was fine but the chimichurri was more like a sour salsa verde than a chimichurri. The salsa fresco translated into a runny pico de gallo with chunks of avocado. Megan ordered the cilantro chicken with linguine. The roasted corn sauce was tasty but the name was deceiving- I totally missed the cilantro part. For dessert, we ordered the toffee chocolate mousse. It was more like a dense piece of cake that had been sent pre-sliced and frozen- not very impressive. I liked the simple ambiance and bar area of Mac’s…maybe just appetizers and cocktails next time.

Sunday morning we had brunch up at culinary school. Groggy after the 6am wake-up call, I trudged in and began prepping jicama for the salad, tomato concasse for the minestrone soup and a trio of purple, Idaho, and new potatoes for the roasted potatoes. I waited tables for the next few hours and chatted with customers amongst quite the gourmet spread.

Monday night, it was “Mother Sauces” week at school. We were asked to prepare the five mother sauces (espagnole, béchamel, veloute, tomato and hollandaise) as well as an assortment of secondary sauces from the espagnole and béchamel, a homemade mayonnaise and a blender method for hollandaise. The night ended with tomato sauce covering my apron from the immersion blender- sauces were difficult and definitely tedious to perfect. Next week is egg cookery!