Peter Callahan's Party Food Read online

  2 tablespoons ponzu (see Note)

  Coarse salt and freshly ground white pepper

  In a medium saucepan over medium heat, cook the shallots with the lemon juice and white wine until almost dry. Add the cream and continue to cook until reduced by half. Reduce the heat to low and whisk in the butter 1 tablespoon at a time until incorporated into the sauce. Add the ponzu and whisk until smooth. Whisk in salt and pepper to taste and serve immediately.

  NOTE

  Ponzu is a tart, citrus-based sauce commonly used in Japanese cuisine. Look for it in the Asian food aisle.

  SALSA VERDE

  Makes about 2 cups

  2 cups fresh basil leaves, coarsely chopped

  2 cups fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves, coarsely chopped

  2 tablespoons capers, drained

  1 garlic clove

  Grated zest and juice of 2 lemons

  ⅛ teaspoon dried red pepper flakes

  ½ cup grapeseed oil

  Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper

  Place the basil, parsley, capers, garlic, lemon zest and juice, and red pepper flakes in a blender or food processor. Pulse to blend. With the motor running, slowly add the oil until the mixture reaches the desired consistency (you may not need all the oil). Season with salt and pepper to taste and transfer to a lidded glass jar. Salsa verde will keep in the fridge for about 2 months.

  SURF AND TURF

  When it comes to beef, the most popular dish we do is a prime New York strip. It’s the most flavorful, yet it’s lean. And prime meat is very tender. The tiger prawn really is gigantic, but you could use two jumbo prawns instead.

  The side vegetables here are grilled yellow squash, zucchini, and plum tomatoes. All are cut into thick rounds; tossed with olive oil, minced garlic, chopped basil, and salt and pepper; and then grilled and garnished with small basil leaves. We serve two sauces: horseradish for the beef and a chunky cocktail sauce for the prawn (see this page).

  My favorite part about this dish is that we use a cutting board as a plate. We first served it this way at an outdoor wedding for four hundred people, held on the prairie in Oklahoma. We made the cutting boards and brought them with us.

  Serves 6 to 8

  SEARED NEW YORK STRIP

  2 8- to 10-ounce New York strip steaks, 2 inches thick

  ½ cup minced garlic

  1 cup minced shallots

  1 small bunch of thyme

  4 rosemary sprigs

  1 cup extra-virgin olive oil

  Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper

  Sauce of your choice

  Rub the steaks with the garlic and shallots and place in a single layer in a baking pan. Scatter the thyme and rosemary over the top. Fill the pan with enough olive oil to cover the beef, wrap the pan in plastic, and refrigerate overnight.

  Bring the meat up to room temperature 1 hour before cooking. When ready to cook, remove the beef from the oil and wipe off the excess oil, garlic, and shallots. Season with salt and pepper.

  Heat a grill or grill pan to high heat until almost smoking. Grill the steaks for 3 to 4 minutes without moving them. Flip them over and cook for 3 to 4 minutes more for medium rare. Let the meat rest for 10 minutes before slicing into ¼-inch slices for the plate.

  Serve the sliced steak with the poached prawns, a selection of seasonal vegetables, and the spicy cocktail sauce and beef sauce of your choice on the side.

  POACHED GIANT TIGER PRAWNS

  1 cup dry white wine

  1 lemon, sliced

  2 bay leaves

  ¾ cup coarse salt

  8 black peppercorns, cracked

  8 giant tiger prawns (13–15 count per pound), or 16 jumbo shrimp, shells on and tails intact

  Spicy Cocktail Sauce (this page)

  Prepare an ice water bath. In a 5-quart pot, combine 6 cups water with the wine, lemon slices, bay leaves, salt, and peppercorns. Bring the mixture to a boil over medium heat; then reduce to a simmer. Add the prawns and cook until they are no longer transparent and have just turned white and pink, 4 to 5 minutes. Take care not to overcook. With a spider or a large slotted spoon, transfer the prawns to the ice water bath, then drain on paper towels.

  Peel the prawns while holding them under cold running water. Still under running water, use a paring knife to make a shallow slit down the middle of the back of each prawn to expose the black vein. Lift out the vein with the tip of the knife and wipe it off with a paper towel.

  Serve the prawns with the sliced strip steak, a selection of seasonal vegetables, and the spicy cocktail sauce and beef sauce of your choice on the side.

  Spicy Cocktail Sauce

  Makes 2 cups

  2 garlic cloves

  1 shallot

  ⅓ cup (packed) roasted red peppers

  3 tablespoons honey

  1 teaspoon Tabasco sauce

  3 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

  1½ teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

  1 cup ketchup

  ⅔ cup prepared horseradish, drained

  Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper

  Place the garlic and shallot in a blender or mini food processor and pulse until pureed. Add the roasted red peppers and pulse until chopped and combined. Transfer the mixture to a medium bowl and add the honey, Tabasco, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, ketchup, and horseradish. Stir to combine and add salt and pepper to taste.

  RAW BAR BOAT

  I grew up in a boating family and spent a lot of time on the water. We get a lot of requests for raw bars and, to me, the beauty of the raw bar is all about how you display it. Back in the day there would be a large Plexiglas bowl, maybe with a big carved-ice seahorse in the middle, illuminated in blue. Spanky’s Raw Bar on Nantucket always set up its raw bars in small wooden boats—and we once set up a raw bar in a client’s rowboat. All of which led me to think of doing a carved-ice boat.

  Okamoto Studio Custom Ice carved the boat, which sits in a tray of shaved ice, and all the food—clams and oysters; cocktail sauce, horseradish, and mignonette sauce; crab claws and shrimp—is arranged on ice in the boat.

  BEEF TWO WAYS

  Short ribs are a chef’s best friend because there’s no such thing as overcooking them. In catering, especially with large dinner parties, you don’t always know your timing. Sometimes a speech goes long or people are dancing, so you look for dishes that you can hold without sacrificing taste.

  This is a great dish for home entertaining because much of the work can be done ahead of time. The tenderloin is marinated overnight and, if you wish, you can prepare the short ribs the day before, up to the last step of reducing the braising liquid. It’s also a reasonably inexpensive dish, with the exception of the amount of red wine needed to make a really good sauce.

  We serve this with roasted kale (purple, variegated, and green) and roasted sweet potato wedges.

  Serves 4 to 6

  BRAISED SHORT RIBS

  3½ pounds boneless beef short ribs

  Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper

  ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

  5 garlic cloves

  2 large sweet onions

  1 carrot, cut into 1-inch pieces

  1 celery stalk, cut into 1-inch pieces

  1½ 750-ml bottles of dry red wine

  1 teaspoon crushed black peppercorns

  5 thyme sprigs

  1 bay leaf

  1½ quarts beef stock

  1 3-ounce container beef or veal demi-glace

  Preheat the oven to 300°F. Season the short ribs with salt and pepper. In a Dutch oven, heat the olive oil over medium heat until almost smoking. Add the ribs and sear until well browned, 4 to 5 minutes on each side. Remove the meat from the pan and set aside.

  Add the garlic, onions, carrot, and celery to the same pot and cook over medium heat until lightly browned, 5 to 7 minutes. Pour the wine over the vegetables and simmer until reduced by half.

  Add the peppercorns, thyme, bay leaf
, stock, and demi-glace and return the short ribs to the pot. Bring to a boil and turn off the heat. Add salt and pepper to taste. Cover the pot tightly and braise in the oven for 2½ hours or until the ribs are fork-tender.

  Transfer the ribs to a platter, strain the braising liquid, and return both the ribs and the strained liquid to the pan. Let cool completely, about ½ hour.

  Once cool, trim the ribs of any excess fat or gristle and portion onto serving plates. Skim the fat from the braising liquid and reduce over low heat to a sauce-like consistency, about 8 minutes. Drizzle over the ribs.

  BEEF TENDERLOIN

  1 2-pound, center-cut tenderloin, trimmed and tied by the butcher

  1 cup minced shallots

  ½ cup minced garlic

  4 fresh thyme sprigs

  2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil plus more for marinating

  Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper

  Place the beef in a pan just big enough to hold it (a 9 × 13-inch pan usually works well). Scatter the shallots and garlic over the meat and add the thyme. Fill the pan with enough olive oil to cover the beef, cover the pan with plastic wrap, and refrigerate overnight.

  Bring the meat up to room temperature 1 hour before cooking. When ready to cook, remove the beef from the pan and wipe off the excess oil, garlic, and shallots. Season the meat with salt and pepper.

  Preheat the oven to 450°F. Heat the 2 tablespoons oil in a large ovenproof sauté pan over high heat. Add the meat and brown it completely on all sides, 4 to 5 minutes per side. Move the sauté pan to the oven and roast until an instant-read thermometer reads 120°F for rare, 10 to 20 minutes (the meat will continue to cook while resting).

  Let the meat rest for 10 minutes before carving into ½-inch slices, taking care to remove any butcher’s twine.

  BURGERS AND FRITES BUFFET It’s such simple food—burgers and fries—but we elevate it to new levels with this look.

  A display has a lot to do with selecting interesting containers to hold the food, and placing them at different levels and heights so that everything can be seen, yet is still easy to reach. We serve three different kinds of burgers (a veggie burger, a beef burger, and a short-rib burger) and a variety of fries (classic pommes frites, spicy Cajun, decadent truffle-Parmesan, and fried zucchini). The condiments and accompaniments fill the front row.

  And once again we supersize cones here, which we dreamed up when my chef said, “I wish I could just supersize these mini cones.”

  GINGER-SCENTED ROASTED CAULIFLOWER

  Certain New York food moments are great; they’re just quintessentially reflective of the city. Like when mac ’n’ cheese became so big as an entrée that the fanciest restaurants were serving it for obscene amounts of money. Some famous actor would be quoted in the press saying that his favorite restaurant doesn’t even have mac ’n’ cheese on the menu but they’ll make it for him every time. As if it’s a culinary achievement? It’s like the emperor’s new clothes, and I’m all for it.

  So I loved it when a few years ago restaurants started calling a slab of cauliflower taken from the center of the head a “cauliflower T-bone.” Because now that you call it a T-bone, it’s $45 on your menu. My wife is always trying to figure out ways to get our teenage daughter to eat more vegetables, so I serve her a cauliflower T-bone. Now we’ve put it on our menu as a vegetarian entrée, silent request (see this page), and it’s gluten free, which has become a common request.

  You have to start with a nice center cut from the cauliflower. We brush it with good olive oil and powdered ginger and then roast it in a hot oven until it’s charred, but not burnt, and soft and caramelized. We add a little broth (vegetable broth or our Wild Mushroom Soup, this page) and some vegetables around it, in this case a roasted spring onion and three roasted candy-striped beets. All of a sudden that plate looks pretty sexy.

  Serves 4

  1 large head of cauliflower

  ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

  2 tablespoons powdered ginger

  2 teaspoons coarse salt

  Freshly ground white pepper (optional)

  Preheat the oven to 475°F.

  Remove the leaves from the cauliflower but keep the stem intact. With a large, sharp knife, slice the cauliflower in ½- to ¾-inch-thick slices vertically from the top down through the stem.

  Liberally brush both sides of the cauliflower “steaks” with the olive oil. In a small bowl, mix the powdered ginger and salt and sprinkle on both sides of each steak.

  Arrange the steaks in a single layer on a baking sheet and roast until the bottom is golden brown, 15 to 20 minutes. Turn the steaks over and roast until cooked to the desired doneness, about 20 minutes more. Season with additional salt and pepper, if desired.

  CARROT WELLINGTON

  As people eat less meat, chefs at many of the hottest restaurants are presenting menus that are vegetable forward, where vegetables that were once destined only for the soup pot are now the star of the plate. One such chef is John Fraser, and a version of this dish is a centerpiece of his menu at the downtown Manhattan restaurant Narcissa. Here, the concept of that old standby beef Wellington, a filet coated with mushrooms and wrapped in puff pastry, becomes completely modern when carrots replace the meat.

  We serve this with Brussels sprout leaves that are blanched and then lightly sautéed in olive oil with minced shallots and a sprinkle of sea salt. A drizzle of balsamic syrup is added on the plate. Any side salad of sturdy greens in season would be appropriate here.

  Serves 4

  1½ pounds carrots, scrubbed and cut into 4-inch sticks

  Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper

  5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

  3 thyme sprigs

  12 ounces cremini mushrooms, roughly chopped

  1 shallot, finely chopped

  ¼ cup dry white wine

  1 tablespoon fresh tarragon, chopped

  All-purpose flour, for dusting

  1 sheet store-bought puff pastry, thawed if frozen

  1 large egg

  Preheat the oven to 400°F.

  Set a steamer basket in a 3-quart saucepan, fill with water to reach just below the basket, and bring to a boil over high heat. Place the carrots in the basket and steam until tender, about 10 minutes.

  Transfer the carrots to a 9 × 13-inch baking dish, season with salt and pepper, drizzle with 2 tablespoons of the olive oil, and add the thyme sprigs. Roast, turning occasionally, until the carrots are lightly caramelized and a bit wrinkled, about 30 minutes.

  Pulse the mushrooms in a food processor until finely chopped. Heat the remaining 3 tablespoons olive oil in an 8-inch skillet over medium heat and add the mushrooms. Cook, stirring, until all the moisture is gone and the mushrooms begin to brown. Add the shallot and continue to cook until fragrant and soft. Add the white wine and cook until the liquid evaporates. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the tarragon. Let cool completely, about 15 minutes.

  Dust a clean work surface with flour, unfold the sheet of puff pastry, and roll it to a 16 × 12-inch rectangle. Spread the mushroom mixture over the surface, leaving a 1-inch border all around. Stack the carrots in 2 layers in the center, down the length of the pastry, and then roll the long edge snugly up and over the carrots. Place on a baking sheet, seam side down. Beat the egg with 1 tablespoon water and brush generously over the pastry. Bake until golden brown, about 25 minutes.

  Use a sharp serrated knife to carve the Wellington into 1- to 2-inch slices. It will help keep the puff pastry from being compressed.

  RACK OF LAMB

  These are big-eye Colorado lamb chops as opposed to the smaller New Zealand variety. They’re delicious and a nice portion size. We pair the meat with tri-colored snow peas lightly dressed with a lemon vinaigrette, leaving the stems on to give them that “just picked from the garden” look. It’s a very simple touch, yet it really makes the plate. The lamb is so rich that it’s best paired with a light vegetable side. We serve the Salsa Verde (t
his page) separately, because the plate is much more attractive without it. Plus this allows diners to add only as much sauce as they want, where they want it. (Personally, I slather on that sauce because I love salsa verde.)

  Note that the meat needs to be marinated overnight. This makes it much more tender and less gamey. We submerge the meat in olive oil as we do with all our meats to tenderize and improve its flavor.

  Serves 4

  2 racks of lamb, preferably Colorado lamb (have your butcher French the bones and remove the fat cap)

  2 garlic cloves, finely chopped

  1 shallot, finely chopped

  6 thyme sprigs

  1 cup extra-virgin olive oil

  1 cup white wine

  Coarse salt

  Salsa Verde (this page)

  Pat the lamb dry and place in a baking pan just large enough to hold the meat. Scatter the garlic, shallot, and thyme over the meat, then pour the oil and wine over all. The meat should be completely submerged. Cover the pan with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

  Bring the meat up to room temperature at least 1 hour before cooking. When ready to cook, remove the meat from the marinade and wipe clean. Salt the meat generously.

  Preheat the oven to 350°F.

  Heat a dry, heavy 12-inch ovenproof sauté pan over high heat until it’s almost smoking. Add the meat and sear on all sides, then transfer the pan to the oven and roast until an instant-read thermometer inserted diagonally into the center of the meat reads 120°F, 20 to 30 minutes. Let the meat rest for 10 minutes before separating into chops (the meat will continue to cook to medium-rare).