It was very nice meeting all of you in person - it's a shame I didn't have more time to head out on any of your other pomological excursions, but my job schedule is brutal. Plummy, I realized on my way home that the Fruit and Spice Park greenhouse plant I had mistakenly identified as a durian (and which you cleverly pointed out was an Annona) was, in fact, a posh-te. Kudos on recognizing the genus immediately. NTM, I noticed the same thing about the leaf burn on the rambutans at Fairchild - of course, mine seem to have the same problem. I was there earlier today and found ripe cherapus and ripening mangosteens on the trees - very cool.

Sounds like it will be a great evening. I'm sure the chef will be thrilled! This is very nice and can be made ahead of time as well. The Tannery’s Crab Crème Brûlée with Pickled Cucumber and Melba Toast adapted from Paul Flynn via The Afternoon Show and Paul Flynn: Irish Food Serves 4 as a starter “Any time you have something creamy, you need something sharp to offset it. This is why we serve pickled cucumber with this dish. You need something to cut through the cream, and the pickled ginger is the starting point of that,” says Paul Flynn. One of the keys to this dish is its lovely creamy consistency, so keep an eye on your oven temperature: “You put it into a low oven because you don’t want the eggs to soufflé, you want them to gently set, like a custard.” 400 ml (1 3/4 cups) cream 1 egg 2 egg yolks 1 garlic clove, peeled and finely chopped (or grate it directly into the custard mixture with a Microplane grater) 2 tablespoons pickled ginger, drained and finely chopped salt and freshly ground black pepper 150 g (1 cup) picked white crab meat, finely chopped 50 g (1/2 cup) freshly grated Parmesan pickled cucumber, to serve (see recipe below) Melba toast, to serve (see recipe below) lemon wedges, to serve Place the cream in a bowl with the eggs, garlic, pickled ginger and some salt and pepper and mix well. Add in the crab meat, ensuring there is no shell, and mix well again. Cover with cling film and place in the fridge to allow the flavours to infuse for at least 30 minutes, but ideally up to overnight. Preheat the oven to 150°C (300°F). Ladle or pour the mixture into the ramekins, making sure you get an even amount of crab in every ramekin, as the crab tends to fall to the bottom. Place the ramekins in a roasting tray. Fill the tray with warm water until the water comes halfway up the sides of the ramekins. Place this bain marie in the oven and cook for 45 to 60 minutes (check after 40 minutes). When cooked through, the mixture should be set but still have a slightly wobbly consistency. Remove the ramekins from the bain marie and allow to cool ��" the crab crème brûlée should be served at room temperature. When ready to serve, sprinkle a very thin layer of Parmesan on top of each ramekin and brown under the grill. Serve with pickled cucumber, really thin Melba toast (“sort of a retro addition that you don’t see very often”) and a lemon wedge. “So there you have it,” says Paul. “The Tannery crab crème brûlée ��" my classic.” Pickled Cucumber 1 cucumber pinch of salt 50 g (1/4 cup) caster sugar 50 ml (1/4 cup) white wine vinegar 1 teaspoon sweet chilli sauce Slice the cucumber as thinly as you can (a mandolin or food processor’s slicing attachment is perfect for this job). Place the sliced cucumber in a bowl and sprinkle with a little salt. Set aside. Bring the sugar, vinegar and chilli sauce to the boil and reduce for 30 seconds. Take off the heat and allow to cool completely. Once it’s cool, pour the liquid over the cucumbers and stir gently to coat them all. This will keep in the fridge for 2 or 3 days ��" any more and the cucumber loses its colour. Melba Toast Toast slices of white bread and remove the crusts. Slice the bread laterally to make two slices that are half the original thickness of the bread. Rub off excess bread from the untoasted side, then cut diagonally into triangles. Place the untoasted side under the grill until the edges curl. The Tannery Restaurant

Post dinner report. We had about 20 people over for this buffet meal. The idea was to bring out seafood dishes one at a time. Sides and salads were available throughout the meal, and people took plates and sat wherever they wanted at two dining tables, on the living room couch and chairs, or just standing around. As DD and I planned the meal, it started making sense to deviate from the traditional Seven Fishes dinner of full -on entree dishes. Instead, we decided to have every seafood dish more like an appetizer, that you could eat off a small plate with just a fork, so that the evening was more like a cocktail party with endless food. We also decided to keep each dish simple so that preparing seven dishes and serving one every 20 minutes wouldn't be crazy. To the extent possible, we'd prep ahead. When guests started arriving, we had salmon mousse on crostini ready. Two kinds of salmon mousse, because DD objected to my version. I make it by baking salmon, then putting it in the food processor and adding a couple garlic cloves, some shallot, salt and white pepper, heavy cream, a little bit of brie cheese with rind, a pinch of wasabi, lemon zest, processing to the desired consistency and taste, then placing into a squeeze bottle with pastry tip. DD was outraged at the brie cheese, and insisted on making her own version. Which, in the end, included cream cheese :-) Next was a shrimp louie salad. SWMBO made this, so I don't know what was in it. We made a clam fettucine, following a recipe that was so minimalist, it was intriguing. Heat a few garlic cloves in wrote a lot of olive oil, discard the garlic cloves, add clams in shells, cook until shells open, remove shells, extract clam flesh, return clam flesh to oil with parsley, cook a couple minutes more. Yes, that was it. This was a good cookbook, so we thought maybe the stripped-down recipe would bring out the essence of the dish. Turns out it basically yielded clams... in oil - ick. So we used the result as a base for a more full featured clam sauce, which salvaged the dish. DD made oysters in a leek sauce. You shuck oysters, clean the shells, lightly cook oysters to release liquid, combine the liquid, white wine (not too dry - or champagne or Prosecco), and cream into a sauce - there was more to the sauce but I wasn't watching closely - assemble oysters on beds of wilted julienned leek in the shells, broil, then sauce and serve. Meanwhile there was manicotti as well as other side dishes and salads that people brought, on the buffet. I made crab cakes. This was crab meat, minced onion and garlic, parsley, salt and pepper, a little red pepper flake, mixed with boiled and riced potato, molded into patties, dredge in egg and coat in Panko crumbs, then deep fry. A messy thing to do but they came out nicely. Normally I use egg and bread, not potato, as the binding agent, but we were trying a recipe from the Peterson book. It is a cross of crab cake and latke. Personally I prefer the way I usually do it. Then we broiled some halved lobster tails, with plenty of melted butter. We should probably have extracted the meat and cut it to bite size pieces, in keeping with the cocktail party appetizer theme, but by now we'd been cooking for hours and were getting bogged down by guests wandering into the kitchen, helpfully and insistently busing piles of dirty plates and glasses into the midst of our prep and cooking space. So I was having to do dishes while DD cooked, and our smooth process was getting chaotic. That's the drawback of a small kitchen. My new dishwasher requires a particular workflow. One side of the sink is full of soapy water. Dishes are scraped into the other side of the sink (that has a garbage disposal) then placed in the soapy water. When enough dishes have accumulated, they are removed from the water and placed into the rack which is loaded in the dishwasher. After the dishwasher cycle, which takes three minutes, the rack is removed and set on the counter. The dishes and glasses come out very hot so they are dry in a minute. Quickly remove and stack the clean ware. This is an effective way to wash a lot of dishes very quickly, but definitely interrupts cooking. The seventh dish was to have been scallops in lobster butter. We collected the lobster shells and were starting to make the butter, but then SWMBO reported that everyone was full and it was time for tea, coffee, dessert and the White Elephant present game. So we shelved the seventh seafood dish with some relief. There was still a lot of cleaning up to do!

Monty, I'm thinking of Moe and hoping he is feeling much better. Jasdip, it looks good to me. My meatloaf always fell apart, I put so many veggies in there. Now I "cheat" by putting all the vegetables in the blender with a little chicken broth. All the flavor, but the meatloaf stays together! Those potatoes look really, really good. Those skinny stalks are either young crowns or old crowns. All the fiber in asparagus is in the outside peel, so the thinner the stalk, the tougher, because it's all peel and no soft middle. Sometimes, though, you just have to take what you get, and sometimes it's worth it. I did roast the thin stuff I bought for 99 cents a pound and it was edible, but it was chewy! Here we had the traditional St. Patrick's Day meal of corned beef, which I served with Chloebud's horseradish sauce, and that was very, very good. I made scalloped potatoes, cabbage and pureed butternut squash, to get the traditional green/white/orange of the Irish flag and added some home canned peaches and home canned green beans, just for good measure Cheese buns were made with Dubliner cheese and had a cross cut in the top to "let the leprechauns out" just like Grandma used to tell me to do. I made a loaf of gluten free bread with nancyofnc's recipe, but forgot to take a picture. Amanda took the rest of it home so she could have corned beef sandwiches, so it passed inspection, LOL. Dessert was sugar cookies, including a gluten free batch for Amanda. The regular cookies were frosted green and Amanda's were frosted white with green sugar, so we didn't mix them up. We even used the special Irish coffee cups and did it up right, LOL. Corned beef, obviously: Scalloped potatoes: Cheese buns: And, of course, cookies: Before that, I made meatballs, lots of them! And we had a smoked brisket, which we sliced on the slicer and then Foodsaver sealed the extra for the freezer. I think Chloebud's horseradish sauce would be really good with this too. We also had some smoked chicken leg quarters, which I served with brussels sprouts, but I can't find the picture, which I know I took. And, of course, I had my "supervisor", making sure I did everything right! Last night we had pork chops and green beans and it wasn't pretty enough to take a picture. As Jasdip says, only the best for the CF. (grin) Annie