So Rachel's mom is turning 70 in April and we're traveling to Woodstock to see her. For her birthday I agreed to cook a nice dinner for her and some of her close friends in the area. Last night we had a test run and I put together a salmon fillet with mushrooms, shallots and asparagus en papillote! Oh man, what is that you ask? Basically it's where you cook something like fish in parchment paper. What I did was placed a 1 1/2" fillet of salmon, topped it with a slice of lemon and butter/dill mix, over a mixture of mushrooms, with asparagus to the side on a large piece of parchment. I then folded the paper over the fillet et al. and did my best to roll and crease the parchment together. I then baked it at 350 for approx. 25 minutes. The parchment cooks the fish perfectly and the asparagus and add a great flavor (but I would not recommend using shitiki mushrooms).
Then came The PAVLOVA! This thing looked so good in my recent copy of Gourmet and I thought it would be perfect for the birthday dinner. Here's the recipe. It's a very impressive dessert, and tasts like an upside-down lemon mergrane pie with berries. We found it kind of a pain to make if you're using a hand mixer. It's also super sweet (I'd recommend cutting the sugar down slightly) and the lemon curd is pleanty lemony with one tsp of lemon zest. An additional lesson learnt was that the pavlova grows while it's baking so be sure to use extra parchment (not the dumb little 7" round they recommend. So in the end we thought it was good, but unfortunately we're going to have to find something else for the dinner.
