Julia Child Dinner Party-Part 4-The Food

Each guest at my Julia Child Dinner Party was assigned a particular recipe of Julia's to prepare. See the menus here. I also sent them an e-mail to the affect that Julia's recipes were not exactly hard to prepare but did take time to make, so please plan enough time in their schedule to do them proper justice. My particular dish was the Terrines de Legumes au Coulis de Framboise (or vegetable mold with raspberry sauce). It called for celeriac. What in the heck is that? I went to the best grocery store here and low and behold there it was a bulbus root with stalks attached! It is actually celery root although I am not sure where we get our celery from. It didn't look like the celery we normally buy. But, anyway. Also it called for 1# of young, sweet carrots. I bought the long young carrots with tops attached. And also fresh peas. But since pea season has past, I purchased frozen petite peas. With petite in the description I figured they must be french peas! I peeled the celeriac then sliced it, then I peeled every piece of brownish root off it again until it was nearly all white. After peeling and quartering the carrots, I had to cook each vegetable separately in its own pan, then puree each one separately. ( It kind of reminded me of when I made my children's baby food). To each vegetable puree was added some heavy cream mixed with a couple of eggs (to help thicken and hold it's shape). After using all my pans and almost as many bowls on these vegetables, I used 3 pastry bags when I filled each one with a different vegetable then squeezed first the carrots in an even layer in a loaf pan, then the peas were layered, and last the celeriac. This loaf pan was put into another pan in the oven and boiling water was added to the outer pan then they were baked for an hour. I think it was kind of like making custard pudding only of vegetables. After it came out and cooled some, it is turned over onto a serving plate. While it is baking a sauce of raspberries, raspberry vinegar was cooked then strained into a sieve to make a most delicious sauce to serve around the individual slices on each plate.It was a very beautiful presentation for the first course.
Dinner was to begin at 7pm. Guests started arriving just after I had put the terrines into the oven at 6! Help!! Luckily I had some lovely light Peach/apricot and Lemon slush Punch to serve them on the porch (and get them out of my kitchen while I tried to unmold those terrines.)
I didn't want an audience if it didn't come out of the pan!. Everyone's food was absolutely delicious and the best part was hearing their stories of their day in the kitchen. Just a sample: the Boef Burguoine has 47 steps! and the French Bread took 10 hours! But it was so worth it. For the Chocolate Almond cake above, the almonds had to be pulverized in a mortar and pestal.

But everyone loved doing it, having the party and would do it again and every dish was so wonderfully delicious. Hats off to Julia and to those who try her recipes,

Bon Apetit!!

To see directions for making the chef hats click here.

For more delicious recipes click here. for Designs by Gollum our host for Foodie Friday.