NON-ALLITERATIVE TUESDAY: MY MENU

Non-Alliterative Tuesday: no obligations, no rhyme, reason or methodology other than that it's something relevant to food and goings-on in Kitchen Toro...

It's getting close to time to serve up the menu for my final project and I'm still trying to decide on the lineup so I've forced myself to commit to a first draft for today's Non-Alliterative Tuesday. I've looked over the criteria, experimented and sucessfully tested a dish for the menu, and gone searching for plates to fit the menu's style. Now I'm working on naming the theme-- thus far it's called Well-Traveled Classics Reintrepreted."

But I'm missing some dishes and have yet to flush out a few courses, something I need to remedy quickly.

I had planned for an amuse-bouche of cured salmon with a caper cream cheese and toasted mini-flagle but I'm kabashing the bagel right off the bat-- not sure I want to have it represent the American dish reinterpreted here. I want to used the cured salmon in the fish dish and it can represent a Norwegian dish but how much of a "standard" is it to be reinterprested as a main course? So far I've got an "Italian-American" appetizer reimagined; an "Italian-American" pasta dish reimagined; an Indian dhaba chicken classic barely reinterpreted; and what I think is a pretty creative reinterpretation of a Thai dessert.

Amuse Bouche
??
???

Appetizer
Chilled Caprese
Tomato Glacee, Homemade Mozzarella and Basil Sorbet

Pasta
Manicotti
Homemade Ricotta and Goat-Cheese Manicotti

Fish
Poached, Drunken Gravalax
Citrus & Tequila Cured Salmon, Mashed Potatoes and Braised with Chili Peppers

Entree
??
Butter Chicken with Onion Naan and Iced Cucumber Raita

Meat
??
???

Dessert
??
Thai Iced Tea Ice Cream with Coconut Sticky Rice

The problem with the menu I'm seeing so far is that as a concept it's not over-arching. It's more like, "Things Arturo Would Like To Cook, Eat and See on Menus When He Goes Out To Eat." Clearly there's some work left to do.

Okay, let's see here, perhaps the theme should be "Reimagined Classics from Global Dhabas." Dhabas are homey restaurants found along the highway in India that serve local cuisine. As much as I've eaten in some of the city's trendy restaurants and enjoyed haute cuisine, especially recently, having worked at the Dining section at The Times and attending culinary school at FCI, some of the food I've enjoyed most during this time and overall are still those simple dishes I find at local haunts.

Two of my favorite upscale restaurants that I've visited since January are A Voce and Momofuku Noodle. The idea I'm striving with here is to upscale standard comfort dishes you'd find in cozy, down-home, hole-in-the-wall restaurants of different cuisines. I need a solid fish dish, a solid meat dish and I need to settle the redundancy of Italian-American classics. I could deal with the pasta issue by removing the manicotti and replacing it with a small Pho soup which would introduce that homey Vietnamese classic. But I'd have to find the angle on it.

For the meat or the fish dish I could do a fish or meat taco. That would still leave me with a hole to fill in one or the other but it's a start. I need to come up with names for some of the dishes and shore them up as well. That would free up the fish which could mean I could do the mini bagel with lox as the American deli amuse bouche.

NY Deli Bagel
Italian Restaurant Caprese
Vietnamese Pho
Mexican Taqueria Fish Taco
Indian Dhaba Butter Chicken
MEAT??
Pad Thai Place Dessert

I'm tempted to do a burger, shepherd's pie or play off a Jamaican beef patti for the meat dish , maybe bul gol gi (Korean barbecue) or steak frites, so I'm going to put the menu down for a while and think about things before I do anything too rash. Some further research into the standard classic dishes of what I'm calling 'global dhaba' cuisine is a good place to start. Done well, there's no reason these classics can't be pulled together into a very palatable, pleasurable menu. I can see the awning..."Turo's Dhaba."

I'd love to think of a three more desserts and include a dessert tasting menu too (I'd like to do some cocktails but I may be getting too ambitious). So far the dessert tasting menu would line up as follows:

Gulab Jamun, Fired & Iced
Warm gulab jamun, lightly dressed with rosemary syrup with honey ice-cream

Kha Niao Man with Cha Yen Ice Cream
Thai Iced Tea Ice Cream with Coconut Sticky Rice

Crepes

Peach Cobbler

A play on tiramisu? Coffee ice cream? Rice pudding? Like I said, there's some work yet to do. Time to make the donuts...no, wait, NO donuts-- Thomas Keller already did that.