Winter Appetizers - Miniature Shrimp Chowder Cups

In the run-up to New Year's Eve, we had seen Hubert Keller prepare an appetizer that sliced fingerling potatoes into small cups that held herbed goat cheese for a party appetizer.

 It got us thinking, what if we created mini-soup bowls using the same technique?

Soup...in a Cup..a tiny potato cup.

Flash forward a month...Fair Food Farmstand had some nice looking fingerling potatoes for sale, which we picked up an then sliced into cylinders about 1 inch in length. We scooped out the innards of each potato cylinder, then baked them at 375 until they were soft enough for a toothpick to pass through.

BRAAAAAAAIIIIINSSS

Whole Food had some really nice Maine Shrimp for sale; we hadn't tried these before out trip, oddly enough, to Maine, but the flavor of these diminutive shellfish was powerful enough to flavor the soup and still fit inside each potato cup.

The soup itself used a base broth of butter, shallots, fennel seed & 2 cups of water boiled with the Maine Shrimp and some shrimp shells that we had kept in the fridge just to flavor stock. The Maine shrimp were pulled as soon as they were done...took maybe 1 minute...then shocked in an ice bath. The innards of the potato were also added to the soup stock.

Once the potato scrapings were cooked, a 1/4 cup of cream was added to the broth, which was then spooned into the potato cups and topped off with shrimp and parsley. A shallow pool of soup accompanied the potato cups, along with the excess shrimp. The Maine Shrimp were a perfect fit for the scale of these little, two-bite appetizers.

Ricotta Stuffed Pattypan Squash

Earlier in the Fall, Headhouse Farmer's market had some bright little Pattypan squash showing - Elizabeth picked up a pint and proceeded later that evening to adapt a recipe from her childhood to reduce our ricotta stockpile.

Claudio's ricotta, at $4 per lb. is a steal - we're basically trying to work it into every dish imaginable. This was one of the better experiments...a gratin of sorts placed into the hollowed out squash.

A mix of sautéed squash & shallots, along with some seasoned ricotta, go back into the squash and into a 350 degree oven for 15 minutes until warmed through.

We served the squash alongside roast leg of lamb and prosciutto-wrapped fingerling potatoes for a comforting Sunday Night meal; the fingerlings were a take on something I saw over on Studiokitchen earlier this year, fingerlings cooked in peanut oil, then wrapped in Iberico ham and deep fried. I didn't go as luxe as Shola's version, just boiling the potatoes, wrapping them in prosciutto and finishing them with a pan-fry...neglected to snap a photo of mine but they looked something like this...photogenically nowhere near as close to what Studiokitchen cranks out though.

Marc Vetri's Porcini Crusted Halibut & Blackberry Sauce

I noticed a lone little baggie of dried porcini mushrooms sitting in the far back of the pantry last week and decided that today was the day that I'd do something other than re-hydrate and give to Elizabeth to add to one of her risottos. Actually she was working late that night and I don't have what it takes to make a risotto as good as hers
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Grabbing my latest library loaned cookbook, Marc Vetri's Il Viaggio, I spotted a recipe that used porcinis and blueberries...so unusual sounding that I had to try it.

Porcini-Crusted Halibut & Blueberry Sauce (link to recipe)

Although this blueberry-'shroom combo may not be so odd after all...somebody I met at a party told me that they saw a mushroom & blueberry risotto on a local menu recently. We also sampled a blueberry & basil compound butter that was savory and delicious, another unexpected blueberry matchup that works.

Looking in the fridge, we spied our blueberry supply was gone...we used blackberries instead. I'm thinking the subtler blueberry would play even better with the porcini crust (which, by the way, is very delicate, so once you get the fish in the pan, be gentle!).

OK, I knew there was no way we were going to have time to really give it that fussy-clean look on a Wednesday night after we both got home from work late, but I still wanted to give the dish a partner to the dance that wasn't plain.



Here's a Yukon Gold I halved then punched out with a small biscuit cutter, slicing the cylinders & rings into coins. Put the potatoes in a thin layer of olive oil in a hot pan, let them begin to brown , then salt & pepper, flip, then throw in 1/2 cup of water to make an instant pillar of steam.

This may be common knowledge around the rest of the culinary world, but I just figured out that if you shut your lid on tight when you dump the water, the steam action will cook the potatoes through before they burn to a crisp. When you're about ready to pull the fish or whatever meat you've got on, pull the lid off the potatoes and let the steam cook off...you're left with seared potatoes that are cooked through.

We didn't have blueberries laying around for the sauce so we used blackberries and blood oranges...I think it ended up looking like a fish that wanted to be a bloody rare steak, but it tasted alot better than it looked. The oil & mushroom-dust crust were aromatic and deep, while the berry helped to brighten up and keep moist the meatier halibut...the white-fleshed fish soaked up the flavor beneath the browned crust.

We served this with a warm spinach salad & citrus-bacon vinaigrette; I bought some Pink Navel oranges from WFM that had the firmness of a grapefruit, which made for perfect supremes, but had the seedless & juicy character of the navel orange.