Deena's party

Target time, 5:00.

To my lasting shame, my timing was off. Throughout the day I felt comfortable with the hour but, honestly, those finishing touches all took longer than I calculated. Deena showed up with Lorraine at 4: 30, I think, and I was behind. They went straight to work peeling shrimp (easy peel, I mistook for fully peeled), Lorraine promptly began smearing sourdough pieces already cut with cream cheese already mixed with diced chives. Lorraine confessed to not being a cook, for reals, she said she never cooks. She was splendid, and proved very adept. We had things rolling out the door and up to the party room at 5:05 through 5:30. Not bad, actually.

The good thing about all that last minute assemblage is the sandwiches were absolutely fresh and the baked items were straight out of the oven. None of this preparing in advance and holding for hours bullshit.

The problem with being rushed is guests were arriving early and I didn't have time for thoughtful photos. I did manage to snap off a few, even reverting to automatic setting when stepping out of the fluorescents which never makes me feel good because I didn't have time to mess with working it all out.

Lorraine hung around and cleaned up my kitchen, bless her. We were completely cleaned up by 6:00, and believe me, it was total chaos.

1) Cucumber sandwiches on sourdough, which pretty much defies the premise of cucumber sandwiches, but it's what Deena wanted so that's what we did. Having already defied the premise, I took the liberty to further confound it by adding shrimp halves. The sandwiches were smeared with cream cheese with finely diced chives, overlain with three paper-thin cucumber slices, and topped with shrimp half, decorated with a faint wisp of dill sprig.

2) Ramaki made the usual way. Fresh water chestnuts instead of canned. Nicks of Bell and Evans chicken livers, the icky portions discarded, rolled in brown sugar and wrapped in thinly sliced smoked bacon. My calculation on this, bacon to water chestnut to liver to toothpicks was remarkably close. Every now and then you win one.

3) Feuilletage. The puff pastry described by Lucy in Lyon. Used the Cuisinart for this and I must say I do not care for this method, although it was extraordinary for grating the cheese, the machine tends to over processes what should be a rougher more careless dough, and the feel of what's happening with the butter going into the flour is forfeited, plus you have to observe in the machine how the water is incorporated at the end while the irregular butter chunks continue to process into an entirely homogenous combination. That is not good. When you do it by hand you can go straight for the big chunks and work your way down until you're satisfied. I added too much butter and too much water. Here's what I learned: When you clarify butter you subtract up to 20% of its weight by removing the water. That must be taken into account when you're estimating fat to flour by weight. I did not account for that, thus the Feuillete bled excess butter when baked. Also the chilled spirals baked better than the ones warmed by the kitchen. Too much water was corrected while rolling and folding the dough by dusting each layer heavily and continuing as normal. These spirals turned out amazingly delicate and rich. You really wouldn't ever want to eat more than, say, ten. No, just kidding. One was enough for me.

4) Olive penguins described in the previous post.

In my defense, the thing that threw me off the timing was trimming, slicing and cutting the sourdough. That took much longer than I imagined. Artisan sourdough is a weird bread for this purpose. Its open and irregular crumb challenges thin slicing. Due to internal folds and other irregularities plus their original shape of a boule, some slices produced only one small shape, square, triangle, or circle. But Man, does this bread taste good. These are pissy little open-face sandwiches. The waste from removing the crusts and cutting the shapes is discouraging. It took five boules for less than one hundred sandwiches, possibly only about seventy-five. It was breaking my heart to see so much bread being wasted. My wonderful carefully cultivated, fermented, bread! So much of the flavor of sourdough is concentrated in the crust and here the crust is removed entirely, so whatever flavor present must be conveyed by the crumb. Le boo, le hoo. Plus all the ends from the slices too small for a shape, and shapes with imperfections that preclude their use, all this resulted in two huge bowls of bread trimmings. It would have been easier and much faster to simply discard all that, but I could not. Since I had the Cuisinart already out, I put it to use rendering all that into breadcrumbs. These fresh breadcrumbs, now frozen, have a thousand uses. OK, maybe one use -- breadcrumbs.