Though it happened over a month ago, I figure I should write about the great Bourguignone dinner that never was before I delete the menu from the “next on the menu” section and have it disappear forever.
I had invited my friends Alistair and Suzanna to dinner a week after I had Eddie & Arthur over for a Bermudian dinner. Sometimes I get overly ambitious which proves to be a mistake. I decided to skip on the other “B” cuisines and go directly to Burgundian because I wasn’t confident on the recipes I had for the other cuisines. With only a week to prepare, I didn’t have enough time to research enough to be confident that the Bolivian or Bhutanese menu I’d prepare be both enjoyable and manageable.
It was not as easy to come up with a Burgundian menu as I first thought. It was a given that I’d serve Beef Bourguignonne as a main dish, but finding appetizers was harder. I didn’t want to repeat the same ingredients on different dishes, which meant no mushrooms in the appetizer and no cheese as I wanted to serve a cheese course. That finally didn’t happen so I decided on some cheese pastries. Dessert was even more difficult, I couldn’t find anything suitable save a bread pudding (Mike hates bread pudding) and decided to serve strawberries in wine as we were in strawberry season, though I wasn’t very confident on them. I never could find any vegetables to serve.
The dinner didn’t come out great. The store-bought pate de campagne was great (oh, how I’ll miss pate for the next few months!), but I don’t think Mike liked the eggs Dijon style. I couldn’t quite figure out how the Burgundian cheese pastries were supposed to be, but they sounded like empanadas so I used empanada shells, the cheese filling was OK but not as good as plain cheese.
The braised Boeuf Bourguignone should have been great, and it would have been if I hadn’t let it run out of liquid in the oven. I tried to save it by adding more wine (Cab, I didn’t have any burgundy left) and stewing it for a while, but it wasn’t that great that night. The next day, though, it was like mana from heaven, soooo delicious, convincing me that next time I make it I have to let it rest for a day.
I never found the Burgundian cheeses and never got to dessert, probably a good thing.
For alas, not only did my dinner fail but my guests forgot to come! They are also new parents and the invitation had been extended a month before, so it was easy to understand how they could forget. I have to admit that as much as I wanted to see them, I wasn’t completely upset that they didn’t make it – this was not a meal I was proud to serve.
I’m planning to cook another Burgundian dinner when I get to it, so this menu won’t go on my webpage. Here I leave it just as a memory:
Burgundian food
Pate de Campagne with Cornichons
Eggs Dijon Style with mixed greens
Cheese pastries
Beef Bourguignonne with egg noodles
Vanilla Ice Cream with Strawberries in Wine
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