I started out with some simple nibbles in the lounge, grilled eggplant arancinis that we placed on a bed of crushed nicoise olives with roasted garlic and fresh oregano.  Three sisters farm grit cakes topped with smoked mushrooms and sweet and sour peppers.  The last nibble was truffle root vegetable crostinis.  Look at that knife work, my Sous Chef Nolan clearly passed skills class!

We had to play with our new kitchen toy, seeing the look on my Sous Chef Dino’s face when he plays with the cryovac machine is priceless, he’s happy Dino!  We made compressed watermelon carpaccio topped with marinated kumatos, watermelon radish, slivered onion rings, cucumbers, fried capers, fried ginger and mint.

We had some beautiful local baby carrots, I cooked each seperately golden with garlic, orange with ginger and purple with chilies.  They were cut into small rounds and tossed with dried baguette and the remaing cooking liquids and parsley to make a panzanella.  This was wrapped in basic eggless pasta dough and baked.  Garnished with olive oil poached fennel and a pesto of arugula and hazelnuts.

At this point in the evening the rest of the guests at the table were eating steaks and drinking bigger red wines, so I took a simple and beautiful approach to match. Grilled king trumpet mushrooms, asparagus and watercress emulsion, corn shoots and (below) caramalized caulifower and olive oil crushed yukon gold potato gratin with fresh thyme.

Dessert, I didnt get to take a picture but it looked and tasted amazing.  John a.k.a. PC1 and Amanda made a heirloom apple crisp with organic oat struesal and orange sorbet.  A fun day of cooking during a classic Chicago winter blizzard!