Cat and Jason

We decided to invite two of favorite chefs, Cat and Jason from Palate over for dinner. It is challenging inviting professional chefs over, but they appreciated it and didn’t put pressure on us.

They said they would make the salad and we watched them to learn techniques. One thing that I learned  is they gradually whisk the oil into the vinegar emulsifying it into a creamy texture. By making it thicker when added to the lettuce the dressing clings much better to the leaves than simply pouring oil and vinegar separately on the lettuce. We have an old salad spinner that apparently you can’t buy anymore. They really appreciated using the classic tool.

We of course had to start with Crab in Creamy Spicy Sauce. We love it as a starter. The recipe can be found in our blog of: September 5, 2010. Click the date to get the recipe.

We had purchased a White Salmon at McCalls Meat and Fish. This is a rarer type of salmon and is lighter in color do to being raised in areas that don’t have shrimp. Jason had a clever idea that we would never have come up with. We planned to cook the Salmon in the Egg on a rack. He placed small potatoes in a pan, put the rack on the pan, then covered the rack with asparagus and finally placed the salmon on the asparagus to go into the Egg. The juices from the salmon marinated the asparagus and potatoes as they cooked, it was a very good idea. We will do it again that way.

The dinner was a hit and they left us to go to a concert downtown: full, happy and floating.