For Monday night dining, this week, we wanted to keep things simple, due to all of the events going on in our lives, with upcoming world premiers of Stephanie Martin’s Babel, and Opera in Concert’s world premier of Isis and Osiris. As we were trying to come up with some dishes that we could do, without much prep, Shawn came across a package of quails in the freezer. “Well we need to make some room in here.” And thus it was done…. To heck with simple, let’s debone quails.
Our friend Luke was over, to do some yoga with us, so joined our trio for a hearty spring feast. We have been going through a bit of kale lately, and since it had gotten a bit colder again, we wanted to have a last crack at more savory fair, before summer, so we started with a Green minestrone soup.
This was stick to your ribs kind of food. One might call it “Kale” and hearty…. Get it???
For the main, we had Quails stuffed with veal, pork, porcini mushrooms and chestnuts, with celeriac puree and sautéed spinach.
Who knew you could fit all of those flavours into a tiny quail. The sauce, with quail stock and veal demi-glace, put it over the top just enough. We served a Jackson-Triggs pinot grigio with the main.
With our herbal tea, we served a Pear spice cake with cinnamon mascarpone, sautéed spiced pears and honeyed golden raisins.
This is another recipe that we have been thinking of making for a while. Now that we have the silpat pans for it, you may see something similar make an appearance on this blog in future. The spice cake, with the fruit, gave kind of a Christmas throwback to the dish, which kind of matched the colder weather. It was a nice relaxed evening of deprogramming, de-stressing and catching up with friends, but being a Monday, in season, we had to head off to rehearsal, to work out some of the finer points of Mahler and Brahms. Oh… in answer to the title of this blog entry…. “None. Shawn did it all by himself.”
