I learned several good and important lessons from the roulade from last night. The most important of which is that, presentation is important and nice when it works out but taste is far more important. The rolled salmon, cod and shrimp didn't exactly look like old Alton Brown's beautiful work but it tasted damned close.
Other lessons: make sure the salmon is filletted much thinner next time as its damn hard work to fillet a 2 pound slab of luscious reddish-pink salmon. Ditto for the cod though it was white. The super sized jumbo tiger prawns were a perfect substitute for Alton's sea scallops and added a very rich, buttery taste to the dish. The bigger and sharper the knife being used to slice the roll into 3/4 inch slabs, the better, trying to do it with a smaller knife can work but its much more difficult.
The compound butter (really just an herbed butter, rolled in parchment and frozen for ten minutes to set up) added a really finish to the dish but I did end up grabbing a fresh lemon and giving them to everyone if they wanted it. I don't know why fish tastes so much better with lemon than without it but it does, I do know that much..
Our guests enjoyed themselves and loved the dinner so that was cool. And there was plenty left over so that we were able to give them two extra roulades to take home for today. And there's one left over in the fridge right now but its not got my name on it, I'm pretty sure Paula's gonna get it for lunch.
The big blue bottle of Pinot was very good and Paula's fried asparagus was excellent as usual. Overall, it turned out to be a quite excellent meal and, for our first mini dinner party, we're both happy with the results. And I've got a whole bunch of tricks to remember for next time.
War Front News
Lots of interesting stuff in the war today. joyous Iraqis knocking over statues of Saddam in Baghdad, torture centers being discovered, US military uniforms found in a prison but no POW's, some old fashioned crowing by the US government and a warning to Iran (are they on the enemy list again? I can never keep track anymore, isn't there a website for this?) and North Korea to learn from the lesson we've just administered to Iraq and the US government took the opportunity to get back at a few journalist by hitting their hotel with a tank's main cannon.
And amazingly enough, no more bad "friendly fire" incidents on the morning. But give them some time and some jarhead from the Midwest will unload his M-16 into a crowd of Canadian soldiers or a US throttle jockey will "accidentally" fire a missile into friendly airspace. That has been the over riding thought I've taken from this war, I think most of the casualties on the coalition forces side have been self inflicted. And that says several things about them, they kick ass when they kick ass but don't let them sit around too long or they start killing each other.
And, from Carlene's Stiletto Philosophy comes this excellent reminder of why our forces are overseas in the first place. Some may not agree with it and some may be offended but it serves as a powerful argument to me.
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