MasterChef!

We became enamored by the Seared Halibut with Sweet Corn Sabayon as created by Cat Cora for an episode of Master Chef, one of Gordon "You Donkey!" Ramsey's eleventy billion cooking shows.  Chef Cora is able to cook the dish in something like 18 minutes.  Yikes.  We've done it several times now, often for our occasional "special" guests, i.e. people that you can fail in front of, like family, and it always takes a lot longer than 18 minutes, but it sure is tasty.

The title of the dish is only half of the story.  Once you sauce the plate with the sabayon and plate the fish, you top the whole thing with a mixture of sauteed thinly sliced red onion, fava beans, arugula, corn and cherry tomatoes that she calls the "salad".  This is a real "composed" dish with all of the major flavors represented: sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami.  (Note that this sabayon (or zabaglione) is savory in nature and thus does not include the sugar and sweet wine of a "normal" sabayon.)

The first time we attempted the dish, we were not happy with the consistency of the sabayon; it was just too runny.  When Peta's brother Sean-of-London visited last year, we cooked it for the second time and the results were the same with the recipe as printed until we added another egg yolks.  With the added egg yolk, the sauce seems to set up better and coat the plate without being too thick or too watery.  You can just ladle it onto the plate and give the plate a swirl and voila, a sweet and savory, mostly circular, eggy base on which to plate your fish and salad.  Super chef-y.

This time, Jim's mom was our test pilot.  We found fresh fava beans at the farmer's market at a reasonable price, but as Jim went looking for the corn and cherry tomatoes, we realized that at nowhere on the planet would sweet corn, arugula, cherry tomatoes and fava beans be in season at the same time.  Sure, this is California, but still.  While at our new favorite store New Frontiers (bulk grains!  oil-cured olives!  marrow bones!), we picked up some frozen sweet corn and utterly flavorless, "organic" Mexican cherry tomatoes while CJ's Lolo (Jim's mom) held down the fort.

We shelled the outer husks of the fava beans while watching the Daily Show and the next day gave them a quick parboil and removed the tough outer skins.  But seriously folks, here's a link to fava beans.

It's an expensive meal with the halibut (we used Alaskan rather than the local Californian because it was thicker, yeah, we know, we're evil.) but it's a keeper.

This is out first actual food picture on the blog.  They just don't look like the ones on other blogs, so that's what's been holding us back.  Clearly, we'll be looking into the lighting/angle/lens requirements of shooting food, although we have no problem with shooting food with a Remington Model 700 BDL when the opportunity presents itself.  Down goes the venison, down goes the venison!!

Jim and Peta