Been a while. Sorry about that. We’re in transition time here at ri100mi.com. Even though it’s Spring by the calendar, we still have a while to go in regards to getting ready for our next 100 mile foray. This year, we’re thinking of doing August and September as our 100 mile only months…and we’re possibly thinking of stockpiling this summer to do a winter month in 2010…we’ll see how it goes.
…anyways, I received a new cookbook a couple of weeks back. I ordered the Alinea cookbook- it took a long time to get here, but was definitely worth the wait. Alinea is a very exciting restaurant in Chicago run by chef Grant Achatz…although he does not use ingredients that are exclusively local to his restaurant, he does cook with the seasons in a way that no one else does. A lot of his recipes are steeped in the molecular gastronomy vein with ingredients that most people don’t use too frequently which is OK- my job is to take the recipes in this book and try to make them as local as possible- hence the oysters used for Oyster, Ginger and Beer Froth. We used some Matunuk Oysters for this one, farmed right here in Rhode Island. A ginger gelee was diced and placed at the bottom of the glass- next, an oyster and it’s liquid was placed on top of that and finally a beer froth was spooned on top. The mixture of ginger, salty oyster and sweet beer froth made for a great flavor profile, and the texture of the gelee and oyster was rather surprising…but pleasant. I could probably have six or seven of these!
-Josh
