Friday, January 1, 2010

First Recipe - Oeufs Mayonnaise

We thought we'd kick this off with something relatively simple - hard boiled eggs with homemade mayonnaise.

Plus, we had all the ingredients here and didn't have to brave the crazy wind and rain by going to the store.

Anne recommends using this as a cold first course, but we decided that we'd enjoy a "light" dinner and something a little out of the ordinary. Eggs and Mayonnaise? Really?

Well, we shouldn't be too surprised. Scott works with a Frenchman from Cannes who enjoys mayonnaise on fries every time they take a supplier out to lunch. However, we always think of the crappy white stuff that is Miracle Whip when people mention mayonnaise.

And what we ended up making was NOT Miracle Whip.




While we have in our possession a Kitchen-Aid stand mixer, a food processor, and a hand mixer, we opted for the tried and true "mixing by hand" option here. Adding the egg yolks, Dijon mustard and vinegar were a snap, but mixing was a little tedious...especially when we had to add the Olive Oil one drop at a time for two teaspoons. Eventually, it all came together and looked amazing!



One thing we did here is use Sparrow Lane's Tarragon Champagne Vinegar to give it some more flavor and it worked really, really well.

We halved the hard boiled eggs and spread the mayo on, just as Anne said. We also took the last egg, separated the white and yolk, chopped up the white and sprinkled the bits on the mayo covered eggs, AND put the yolk through a strainer so that it made these cool tiny strings of hard yolk that we could dust the eggs with. The presentation ended up pretty nice, as you can see.

The flavor was good. The texture was a little lacking, but Anne does say that watercress could be used to cure that problem. Overall, not a bad way to enjoy the first recipe!



We pulled a bottle of Jacquesson 731 to celebrate the kickoff of this project. Champagne is one of our not-so-guilty pleasures that we take extreme delight in. This wine was released several years ago and is perfect today. There is a bit of butterscotch flavor which mingles well with the apple and baking spice notes. A superb bottling and it looks like we'll have to grab some 732 before it sells out.

It plays well with the eggs, and while not a perfect pairing, they still bring out interesting flavors from each other.

One down, many...many more to go.

Cheers!

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