Tolkien Movie Marathon Menu – 2011 Edition

Tomorrow marks the 8th annual Tolkien Movie Marathon at The Tolkien Professor’s college!  Just like last year, I’m in town to cook some tasty (and Tolkien-themed) meals to serve to the students here – and to meet some of the folks at his new online institute – The Mythgard Institute!

Looking forward to seeing some of the friends I made at least year’s marathon, and serving up some yummy goodness!  Here’s the entirely Tolkien-dorky menu (similar but not identical to last year’s):

Breakfast:

• Continental

Second Breakfast:

• Scrambled eggses
• Sam’s spiced home fries
• Sausages and nice crispy bacon
• Tasty Shire-fruits

Elevenses (well, by Valinor Standard Time anyway)

• Bombadil’s Honeyed Bread
• Sam’s Pork Pies, with mustard
• Merry’s Marinaded Mushrooms
• Naz-goulash
• Farmer Maggot’s Crop
• Oliphaunt cheese, from the finest oliphaunt milk

Afternoon Tea

• Lembas bread
• Gollum’s Ruined Fish
• Roasted po-ta-toes
• Grilled veggies
• Ent-draught
• Winner of the Tolkien Recipe Contest!

Dinner

• Sam’s Coney and Tater Stew
• Balrog Wings!  (Smoky and Fiery)
• Mount Doom-Roasted Harvest Veggie and Smashed Potato Platter
• Watcher-in-the-Water Calamari
• Lorien mango and greens salad

Dessert

• Shelob’s-web strawberries and dates
• Grilled Lorien peaches with honey caramel glaze
• Apple crisp with vanilla bean ice cream
• Buckleberry sauce
• Sundry and awesome cakes

Samwise Gamgee’s Pork Pies

With only a couple months left until my friend Corey’s Tolkien LotR marathon (11/12/11 this year), I thought I’d start the lead-up with one of the dishes that we featured last year (and probably will again, this year).  Here’s a link to last year’s menu.  Anyway, miniature actor Samwise Gamgee, possibly best known as “Dave” from Encino Man, dropped by the other day to pass on some tips for how to make his famous Shire pork pies.

These are not for the faint of heart.  By this, I mean that they’re decidedly not for people suffering from acute heart disease.  Or for vegetarians.  Pork pies are really, seriously not for vegetarians.  If you fall outside the union of those two categories, plough ahead and read on!  Also, vegetarians don’t often own meat grinders, but as of today, I do!  (More on that shortly.)

Shire food, according to Corey (also known as The Tolkien Professor, of significant iTunes podcast renown, as well as being the author of an upcoming book) roughly follows English countryside cuisine.  The pork pie, which Bombur (the ultimate fat dwarf) orders at Bilbo’s, has its brief moment of literary glory, accompanied by a hearty salad – no doubt Bombur’s attempt at guilt-free eating.  We’ll celebrate the reference with Sam’s unique take on the dish, lovingly adapted from Bilbo’s original recipe:

Sam's Pork Pie, served with roasted apples and mustard

Onto the recipe!

Cod Fritters with Two Aiolis

It’s time to fry something.  What’s a sunny summer afternoon without standing around indoors over a vat of boiling oil?  Wasted, I say!  After all, the modest warmth of a 90 degree day cannot possibly compare with a 370-degree pot of crackling goodness, whether you’re cooking fritters or preparing to repel some medieval marauders (this post will henceforth refer exclusively to the former practice.)

At a dinner party the other day, I offered up these yummy morsels, with a pair of dipping sauces.

Serves:8-10 people as an appetizer

Cod Fritters with Two Aiolis

Croque Monsieur

Chef Dillicious thinks he’s an awesome is a moderately decent poker player.  But more importantly, he’s also into food.  Yes, I know – this may not have been obvious from either his food blog or his well-publicized weekly bypass surgery (thanks for the free publicity, TMZ!), but in any case, this poker/food combination led me to Las Vegas a few weeks ago.  While there, as mentioned in my Turkey Lettuce Wrap entry, I visited Hubert Keller’s Fleur (formerly Fleur de Lys).  Lifelong friend and fellow foodie Seth C. recommended the tasting menu, but apparently that was a thing of the past when the restaurant was reopened (or it’s available intermittently, or somesuch.)  So I composed my own, ordering various small dishes.  It was an awesome meal.

Here’s what I ordered:

• Salt cod fritters – jamon serrano, pickled garlic, and Romesco sauce
• Croque monsieur – smoked ham, gruyère, béchamel
• Caesar salad – one eyed susan, fontina, truffle, brioche
• Rock shrimp – rice noodles, snow peas, red dragon sauce
• Skirt steak chimmichurri – roasted fingerling, creme fraiche
• Artichoke Barigoule – asparagus, baby carrots, basil
• Panna cotta – blackberry-kalamansi sorbet, strawberry-citrus soup, honey tuile

Note:  I emailed these to myself during the meal on my Droid, which corrected it to read “Flour de Lys”, as well as “Salt cod critters”, which made me giggle.  Heck, it still makes me giggle.

I’d never had a Croque Monsieur before.  It was awesome.  So I decided to make one, and here it is!

Croque Monsieur

Garlic/Ginger Rib Roast With Chuffed Potatoes

My sous chef recently stole borrowed my photography equipment (such as it is) and flew off to Tahiti for a glamour shoot.  So for my Super Bowl party, I was, alas, left without equipment.  (Also:  I had a bunch of hungry people who were more interested in eating the food than in watching me photograph it.)  In any case, you’ll have to trust that the finished product here looks strikingly lke a rib roast with chuffed potatoes, because it sure did!

Jamie Oliver showed a similar recipe to this a few years ago, on his show The Naked Chef, so I nicked it, and it’s turned out to be a home run every time.  Plus, I got to learn what “chuffed” means.  (Well, at least insofar as it pertains to potatoes.)  So, with brief fits of further ado interspersed hereafter (and no photograph), I present: Garlic/Ginger Rib Roast with Chuffed Potatoes.

Pre-Super Bowl Dinner Menu

I’m throwing a Super Bowl party for some friends tonight, and we’re having dinner at Casa Dillicioso beforehand.  I’ll try and get pictures of as much of this as I can – here’s the menu!

• Croque Monsieur appetizer (thank you, Las Vegas!)
• Garlic/ginger rubbed rib roast with chuffed roasted red potatoes
• Caramelized onion and mushroom sauce
• Roasted artichoke hearts and hearts of palm
• Haricots verts Lyonnaises

And then afterward we’ll have, like, chips and soda and dip and stuff, because you can’t keep it *that* classy during the actual game.

Turkey Lettuce Wrap

I spent the weekend before last in Las Vegas, where, it turns out, they have a great many restaurants (hat tip to my friend Seth C. for his recommendation of Fleur, at the Mandalay Bay casino).  This dish was not on the menu of any of them (at least the ones I went to), so I must conclude either that (a) I’m innovative in a way that Vegas chefs simply have not yet attained, or (b) it’s light years beneath them.  You can go ahead and sort out (b) which one (b) it is for yourself (it’s b).

In college (yes, I went to college!  I recommend it), a friend tossed some chicken in a pan and came out with a recipe similar to this.  It’s simple, easy to make, and tasty – perfect for, say, parents!  So here’s the latest installment of Meals for Mamas:  a ground turkey lettuce wrap!

Turkey lettuce wrap, served with dressed fresh tomatoes.

 

Lord of the Rings movie marathon menu!

As many of you know, my good friend The Tolkien Professor, whose podcast has shattered records both in this Age and in the Fourth Age (the heyday of PNN:  the Palantir News Network), hosts an annual Lord of the Rings movie marathon at the school where he is a distinguishedesque professor of English.  Last year, I whipped up a couple of Tolkien-based recipes for him to feed his adoring crowd:

• Balrog Wings (smoky)
• Balrog Wings (fiery)

which were reportedly quite well received, even if several attendees required fire extinguishers (or nice tall glasses of milk) shortly after devouring these tasty morsels.

This year, however, we’ve gone whole hog.  (Well, actually, we’re not eating an entire hog.  It’s an expression.)  I’m currently sitting in the airport, soon to fly down to the greater Eastern Seaboard Area, to whip up some yummies for the movie attendees on Saturday.  I’ve spent a week and a half coming up with the menu and recipes.  So here’s the menu (subject to small last-minute changes)!

Fried Halloumi Cheese Appetizer with Tomato

Halloumi cheese wins the “cool-sounding cheese name” award hands down.  Saying it never gets old.  Halloumi.  HalLOUmi.  Halloooooooumi!

Halloumi is also a cheese with some very peculiar properties.  I’ll leave most of the details to the wikipedia link above, but the the short version is:  it’s similar in taste and texture to mozzarella, and due to the way it’s prepared, it has a very high melting point, as cheeses go.  In fact, early plans for the Mercury capsule involved a Halloumi heat shield to protect it on reentry, but due to a Cypriot trade embargo at the time, ceramics were ultimately found to be cheaper.

It’s used grilled or fried, in many cases.  For dinner the other day (the first appetizer of which was Seared Sesame Tuna Bites), I served these as an appetizer with thin sesame crackers:

Fried Halloumi with Tomato

You may be glad to hear (I sure am) that I’ll be upgrading my camera and photography expertise in the next couple weeks.

Seared Sesame Tuna Bites

Well, it has been far too long since I’ve posted, my 2+ beloved readers (hi, Mom and Dad and possibly one of my siblings!)  For yea, there are times in life when a man must undergo many life changes.  Yes, it’s true.  Since we last met, I moved, learned to shave, got another Master’s degree (in pan-Asian macrame), biked halfway up a mountain and then had to stop because I’m in lousy shape (actually true), and my sous chef has been elected to the Nobel committee (apparently they forgot that they could google him for, you know, some sort of background check.)  That’s a lot of stuff for a man to do, and thus I have been woefully lax in my blogging duties.

But now I’m back.  Much like Gloria Stuart, who revived her storied acting career at age 87 by appearing in the disaster flick “Notting Hill“, I am here to stay!  (Well, except that Gloria Stuart died recently, so perhaps the analogy has a minor flaw.)  Test Subject D and I are now embedded in our new place in a small, relatively unknown coal mining town known as Lexington, Massachusetts, and I’ve set to cooking again.  Trouble, of course, follows me wherever I go, and thus I am learning a great deal about the challenges of cooking on an electric stove whose wattage is roughly that of your average digital thermometer.  But did Michael J. Fox let his Parkinson’s get in the way of him filming Teen Wolf?  No!  And thus I shall also push onward.*

*DilliciousAndItsAffiliatesInNoWayIntendToCompareADebilitatingDiseaseToAnUnderpoweredStove

In any case, I had the pleasure of hosting four fine friends for dinner a few days ago, and the next 4-5 posts will chronicle that meal.  First is a marvelously simple appetizer:  seared, chilled sesame tuna bites.