Every year, if it is at all possible, my good friend Simon Ralph and I find a way to connect. I came to know Simon during my almost 5 year tenure at IATA in Geneva and he has become a close and life-long friend.

Largely, we have managed to find a way to do this...either Simon will visit Dubai or I will visit Switzerland. This year it was the latter, as I had a business trip to London and took the opportunity to schedule a personal side trip on the weekend that followed.

It gives us a good opportunity to connect, shoot the breeze and generally enjoy food, drink and an abundance of good humour. We have also developed a tradition of designing a menu and trying to cook good food for some of our good friends. Last year it was pulled pork and home made baked beans. This year we decided to take it up another notch and designed a dinner theme based on 'diseases'. Don't ask me why, suffice it to say the theme was developed over a few glasses of wine at Simon's local pub. So after much silly conversation between Simon, his wife Colette and I we came up with the following menu:

Ebolla soup (mussels, ginger/chili in a vegetable cream broth)

Strep Trout on a herbpeas puree

Beef not so Wellington

Tiramaflu (the latter contributed by our good friend and fellow Canuck Tony Concil who is a good cook)

The beef wellington was a bit of a bear in that we had to make our own beef stock which takes a day in itself...not a lot of work but it takes time. This was used as a base for a red wine and shallot reduction which ended up being quite tasty. Making the beef wellington was straightforward enough...sear tenderloin set aside and cool. Make a mushroom duxelle with mushrooms, garlic, shallots, fresh thyme. Layout puff pastry, layer with parma ham or prosciutto, then spread on the chilled duxelle (make sure you cook out the moisture in the duxelle), put the tenderloin down and wrap it all snugly around. Cook in 220 oven for about 20 mins.

Colette and I did most of the prep and cooking while Simon worked 'front of house'. Overall the dinner turned out pretty well. We managed to get a few flattering close ups of a few of the dishes (thanks Chen!). Below in order of appearance is tiramflu, beef wellington (before carved and after) and the trout dish. 

We had a very nice dinner and were joined by Tony, Chen and Rich. And I learned a bit more about cooking. The internet is an amazing tool!

Thanks for reading!

Cheers

Lorne