You take your place at a table with friends, situated on an elevated platform that overlooks lush vegetation & picturesque water views. A sea of green & blue, as far as the eye can see, slowly fades to black as the curtain of night is drawn slowly over a fabulous Spring day. A gentle breeze carries wonderful aromas of seafood, chorizo, saffron, paprika and other spices, drawing your attention to a professionally prepared pan of paella. The chef, and host for the evening, takes his place at the table and motions for the guests to begin eating.

You could easily mistake this for an alfresco dining experience at a chef’s table at some fabulously expensive restaurant overlooking water views. Oh no, it’s far better than that. This is just dinner at Lex’s place.

Nice view, huh? :)

Lex, chef by trade and food blogger of vue de cuisinier, had invited a number of food blogging friends over to his place for dinner. Whenever I receive an invite to have food at Lex’s, I do everything within my power to be able to make it as I know that there will be some great food, as well as some great company to be had.

Rather than being a pot-luck sort of affair where every guest brings their own thing like last time, this time around Lex takes over the cooking reins and prepares are two course meal of Scallops Boudin, served with pea puree & salmon roe, as well as a fabulous paella.

To see a professional chef at work is something that fascinates me. If you’d like to see how Lex’s Scallops Boudin & Paella are made, feel free to view the embedded video below of the whole cooking process.

Did you catch all of that? :)

Here it is again. However, at a somewhat more leisurely pace.

As stated previously, dinner for this delightful spring evening begins with an entree of Scallops Boudin, served with a pea puree and salmon roe. It’s essentially like a scallop sausage of sorts.

Firstly, scallops are placed into a food processor, along with some cream and egg whites, and blended into a fine paste.

Oh, don’t forget to season! :)

The scallop mixture is rolled into a sausage shape, poached in simmering water until it sets.

Allow the scallop sausage to cool just enough to handle. Place onto the counter top. Removed the scallop sausage from its casing and voila! You end up with a rather unfortunately suggestive photo that may not be suitable for some viewers.

For a recipe of the Scallop Boudin, look no further than Lex’s post of this recipe on his blog.

The pea puree that accompanies the scallop boudin is simply a mix of peas, cream & butter heated through & blitz together. A hand mixer is employed in this case, though I don’t see why it couldn’t be done in a food processor or a blender.

Plate the pea puree and scallop boudin & top with a teaspoon of salmon roe. If you have an eye for presentation like Lex has, it should look at least as nice as the above image.

The scallop boudin is soft and silky smooth, like silken tofu albeit with the taste of scallops and cream. The pea puree complements the scallop with texture and flavour whilst the salmon roe brings pleasant bursts of saltiness to the party.

The scallop boudin served with pea puree & salmon roe once more. Just because it’s so pretty :)

We move onto our main course, which is the fabulous paella. However, this one comes with a bit of a luxurious twist.

The mise en place of onions, potatoes, tomatoes, red capsicum, artichokes, chicken & chorizo are prepared with an effortless grace by a deft hand and a sharp blade.

The ingredients are slowly brought together into the paella pan along with rice & some paprika.

A generous pinch of saffron soon follows.

This looks so good! I could eat this just as it is. However, there’s still more to be incorporated before this dish is complete.

Some baby octopus and a few handful of mussels are added towards the end to add another dimension of textures and flavours.

What about that twist I’d referred to earlier?

Why, it’s strips of wagyu!

Ok, so it’s not a traditional addition to a paella. Believe me, no one was complaining :)

Scatter some freshly chopped parsley & some lemon slices and we’re done.

There you have it. Lex’s paella, and a damn fine one at that :)

Perfectly cooked mussels poke their maws upwards as if to say “eat me”. Why, thank you. I most certainly will! :)

To be able to dine in such luxury with great food and even better friends, all within the comfort of someone else’s home *sigh* :)

A serving of Lex’s fabulous paella, one of a few that night. The green slime looking thing was additional pea puree. Everyone loved the pea puree so much and since there was so much of it left, we slathered it generously onto every serve.

With a paella and pea puree this good, I assure you that there were no left overs to speak of.

For dessert, Steph brings along a wonderful creation of cupcake cones. Chocolate cupcake on top of a wafer cone filled with a vanilla white chocolate filling. Both on top of and within the cones, pop rocks are incorporated into the dessert. The pop rocks, with its mouth tingling fizz & crackle, renders civil adults, young and otherwise, to the level of primary school children with all the innocence, joy and wonderment that that would imply.

The cross-section of the cupcake cone, cut with expert precision by Richard, along side a whole cone.

Recipe for Steph’s cupcake cones can be found in her post “Ice Cream Cone Cupcakes (with popping candy!)”.

My contribution for the evening was macarons from Adriano Zumbo’s Macaron Day.

I told you there would be another post on this. Promise that this is the last one. Well, for this year at least :)

The macarons are (from top left to bottom right), Lord Nelson beer, chocolate & passionfruit, cheeseburger, Golden Gaytime, doughnut, & mastic, yoghurt, cucumber & mint.

From top left to bottom right, chocolate foie gras, burnt toast & butter, goats cheese & blueberry, & Vegemite sourdough.

As with the previous macaron marathon session, there were some good and some not so good ones. Surprisingly, the cheeseburger wasn’t as good as the previous one I had. It lack a lot of the complexity the previous one had, as it was predominantly tomato sauce and nothing else. I have an appreciation now for why some people weren’t as won over with the cheeseburger macaron as I was the first time around. The other one that didn’t really do it for me was the chocolate foie gras. The cube of foie gras in the center of the macaron didn’t taste much of anything other than perhaps a lump of fairly flavourless fat. It felt more like a textural component than anything else.

Some winners for me were the old favourites the burnt toast & butter & Vegemite sourdough. A new one to add to the favourites list is the chocolate & passionfruit, with its wonderful passionfruit tang which counter balances the richness of the chocolate. The Lord Nelson beer one we had lacked a yeasty note that others experienced previously. It was alright as it was but I imagine it would have been something a little more special with that yeasty element.

A great night of food, friends and fun. Can’t wait for next time!

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Ok, let’s be honest here. Taking photos while you’re cooking up a storm with the limited culinary skills and experience that you have; using a recipe that you’ve never worked with before in any incarnation, is somewhat of a challenge. Some might even consider it somewhat daring. To others, lunacy may be closer to the mark. To each their own I guess.

However, to end up with a product such as the dish pictured above, is it truly worth the hassle? The grumbling and gnashing of teeth? The anxiety of not knowing whether the end product is going to look good through the lens, let alone be edible? The frantic juggling between camera, food, camera, food, food, with the realisation that you’ve just attempted to take a photo with a box of salt?

I’ve always thought that good things are, and I mean the really good stuff, born from a lot of hard work and the right frame of mind. It’s part of the reason why I’d taken up the Daring Cooks challenge in the first place. Anyhow, onto the challenge.

There are three main stages to the challenge – the sofregit (the Catalan equivalent of a sofrito), the aioli and the paella itself.

Before I discuss the process of making this dish, all relevant details regarding the following recipes are conveniently located within a PDF document located at the end of this post. Saves you having to print out the whole blog post just for the recipe.

1. Sofregit

Cooking time: 30 mins.

Ingredients

• olive oil (approx. 1 cup)
• 5 tomatoes, chopped
• 2 small onions, chopped
• 4-5 garlic cloves, chopped
• 1 bay leaf
• salt

Method

1. Heat up frying pan on low heat and add around 1 tbsp of oil.
2. Sweat the onions until translucent and then add the garlic, tomatoes & bay leaf. Sauté for a few minutes.
3. Pour in enough olive oil to cover (approx. 1 cup) and turn up to medium heat so that tomato mixture is essentially deep frying.
4. Fry the mixture until the moisture is reduced & the tomato mixture takes on a dark red colour.
5. Pour off as much excess oil as possible and store for later use.
6. Season remaining tomato mixture with salt & sauté on medium head until salt is incorporated.
7. Remove from frying pan & cool to room temperature.

Notes

You may notice that there is a fair amount of oil used for my version of the sofregit. With that much oil, you’re effectively deep frying the tomato mixture. It’s a tip that I picked up somewhere on the Internet some time ago. It cooks off a lot of the moisture and you end up with a richer tasting tomato paste than you may otherwise.

The tomatoes that you use here make a huge difference. When selecting tomatoes, make sure to get the ripest and tastiest tomatoes you can get your hands on. If they’re out of season, I don’t see why you couldn’t substitute with good quality tinned tomatoes instead.

2. Aioli – Traditional Recipe

Cooking time: 20 mins.

Ingredients

• 4 garlic cloves, whole
• extra virgin olive oil
• pinch of salt
• few drops of lemon juice

Method

1. Place salt & garlic cloves into a mortar & pestle. Pound mixture until it becomes a paste.
2. Add a few drops of lemon juice.
3. While constantly stirring the pestle, add a few drops of oil at a time. Incorporate oil thoroughly into the garlic paste before adding more drops of oil.
4. Keep adding drops of oil until the garlic mixture has the consistency of thick mayonnaise.

Notes

This is pretty straightforward to make. So long as you control the addition of oil to the garlic paste, it’s hard to go wrong.

One thing I would advise is to use the freshest garlic you can get. The stuff I used was a little on the old side so had somewhat of a sharp, bitter taste to it.

3. Rice with Mushrooms, Cuttlefish and Artichokes (Paella)

Cooking time: 45 mins.

Ingredients (serves 4)

• 12 Portobello mushrooms, sliced
• 2 cuttlefish, cleaned & sliced
• 8 small artichokes, quartered
• ½ chorizo, halved & sliced (optional)
• ½ cup Sofregit (approx.)
• 300g (approx. 2 cups) of Spanish rice (Calasparra or Montsant)
• 6 cups of fish stock
• 1 cup of white wine
• 2 bay leaves
• pinch of saffron threads
• 2 tbsp tomato-infused olive oil (from sofregit recipe)
• salt
• aioli, to taste

Method

1. To a paella pan or wide, low brimmed frying pan at medium-high heat, add the tomato-infused olive oil along with the cuttlefish. Fry for around a minute.
2. Add the mushrooms & sauté until mushrooms have softened. If you choose to, add the chorizo at this step along with the mushrooms.
3. Add artichokes & bay leaves. Sauté until artichokes become golden brown.
4. Add a splash of white wine to deglaze the pan.
5. Add the sofregit paste to the pan & stir around until incorporated.
6. Add the remaining white wine & fish stock to the pan. Heat on high until it boils.
7. Add the rice to the pan; stir until just covered by the liquid. Boil at high temperature for around 5 mins and then reduce to low heat.
8. Add a pinch of saffron treads & stir into pan just enough to incorporate it into the liquid.
9. Leave the pan untouched on low heat until the rice soaks up all the liquid & is cooked through (approx. 8-10 mins).
10. Remove the pan from the heat & leave the rice to stand for a few minutes.
11. Serve the paella straight from the pan, adding aioli to taste.

Notes

Once you’ve finished with making the sofregit and the aioli, prepare the rest of your mise en place so that you’re ready to start cooking.

When cooking the paella, I found it a bit tricky to get the rice correctly cooked. I started out with approx. 900g of fish stock (yes, I weighed it rather than using cups). However, I found that by the time the liquid had cooked out, the rice was still a little underdone. I proceeded to add more stock in, which eventually did the trick. I guess one thing to take away from this is that it’s easier to add liquid in when required, rather than take it out.

While on the topic of stock, I found the Market Pride brand of fish stock had an overpowering dill flavour & aroma to it that muted the fish flavours. Though it tasted ok, the next time I make this, I’ll be using a stock that tastes more of fish than herb.

The finished product. How did it taste? Was it worth all the effort mentioned previously?

Honestly? It tasted rather ordinary. Though the paella didn’t taste bad, it lacked a certain depth of flavour. It was rather bland. It ended up as you would expect given the circumstances – like it was made by someone who isn’t of Spanish origin and who doesn’t know how to make a paella, let alone a sofregit; a key component of the dish.

However, that’s the whole point of the challenge, right? To get you to try out new recipes. To challenge your cooking skills. To offer you to cullinary experiences that you may not have otherwise ventured into. On that note, it was worth all the effort. ALL of it. The grumbling and gnashing of teeth. The anxiety and the rather troublesome juggle between food prep and photography. Even the rather ordinary result.

Give the recipe a go and see how you fare with it. I’d love to hear how well, or not so well, you attempt ended up. Oh, and don’t forget about the recipe PDF just below.

Make sure to swing by in a month’s time for September’s Daring Cooks Challenge :)

Recipe: rice with mushrooms, cuttlefish and artichokes