New Year Feast- Part 1

OK in an effort to recover from the "dog poo" post I am finally getting around to the first 3 courses of our New Year Feast. I have my weigh-in today, and this meal certainly did not help me lose any of the 3lbs gained over the holidays.

Course 1: Pate, pears, cornishons, balsamic mini-onions, and homemade bread!

The bread: TE loves Mark Bittman. Loves, Loves. I like his column too- and this bread was fantastic. If you have time, make this bread. You will thank me!
The pate was store-bought (pork, garlic, A-MAZING), the cornishons as well. The pears were sliced and dressed in a citrus honey dressing (the same as the beet salad). I could have eaten all this food and been satisfied. So, so good.
I will have to find out how TE did the onions, I was not paying attention to that part, and they did not come from any recipe that I could find printed out in our stack of NY recipes. But they were also fantastic!

Course 2: Deconstructed clam chowder
First we had to make a dashi. This is basically a fish stock.
Then we followed this recipe, changing it a bit.
We only used 1lb of fish, and we cooked it a bit longer than the recipe stated. It still tasted great but the broth was not as smooth looking as TE wanted it to be.

Course 3: Heirloom Beet Salad with goat cheese

This was a simple and tasty salad. We roasted and peeled all the beets ourselves and in the process learned a secret to keeping your hands from turning purple when working with beets: olive oil! If you have olive oil (or any oil I am sure) on your hands while you are peeling, the color washes right out!
In our salad we used an arugula mix, beets and goat cheese, plus a bit of the dressing. Yum!

I have not calculated calorie information on these recipes/foods. It was a bit of a CR holiday...

OK I am saved! Now you will not see a post about poo first thing on my page :) Stay posted for the main course. Quite the feast....