9/10/09

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.

16 comments:

Maria Killam said...

Wow that was stunning! I want some!!

Marie Rayner said...

What a fabulous meal Jean and it looks like everyone had a wonderful time! I have never seen celeriac with the actually celery attached!!! Over here we just buy it as the root. I just love it. Mashed or made into delicious soups or even sliced and baked as a gratin. Wonderful!

Poppedijne said...

What a fun idea to do was this!! I know that celeriac is not well known outside France and Belgium.Here in Belgium we use it wekely.To make soups from it or add to other soups. To make celeriac mash from it. Or to boil small cubes and add a white sauce and eat it as a vegetable and raw, grated with some mayonnaise it is lovely on a roastbeef sandwich.
We know tree kinds of celary here. The celary you know we mainly use the base from to boil and with a white sauce with an eggyolk in it is very good with patatoes and meat.I only learned to eat it raw after I had bought an American cookbook.
Then we of coarse use the celeriac as discribed above and then we have a very tender green celary that we only use in soups. It is like the celary you use but floppyer, more tender and all green.
Greetings from Belgium and well done with your meal.I will take the idea with me and maybe organise something in those lines.

PAT said...

Wow! Looks wonderful. I wonder if I would be able to find the celery root in our neck of the woods. I'll have to look, next time we're in St Louis.

I made beef bourg. and posted about it last week, in honor of Julia and Julie. It took awhile to prepare. The steps are basic, but time consuming. It was delicious.

Maggie said...

Hi,
Your dinner party looked wonderful & the chef's hat are excellent.
a bientot
Maggie @ Normandy Life

SnoWhite said...

Nice work! I want to try making Boef Burguoine too :)

Cass @ That Old House said...

What a great idea for a party!

All the food looks smashing -- next time, invite me but give me something SIMPLE to make. (Did Julia do peanut butter and jelly?)

Cass

Deanna said...

Dearest Honeysuckle,
I have just gone back through your nice blog and wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed the posts.
Just wonderful!!!

So glad you are a blogger that's sharing. Glad to be able to view your site and glean so many great ideas.

Blessings to you,
d from HomeHaven

Mary Bergfeld said...

What a wonderful idea! Everything looks scrumptious and I'm sure everyone had a marvelous time. How could they not :-).

Joy @ Joy Of Desserts said...

Saw one of your comments about your Julia Child party, and I just had to pop over to take a look. I'm a huge Julia fan! :-) What a great and lovely party you had, and loved all your posts about it. Very ingenious chef hats, too.

lady jicky said...

Now that looked like a ton of fun!
You did not even have to tip the Chef - you all did it yourselves!!LOL

Scooterblu's Whimsy~Rhonda said...

That is one wonderful looking meal! And what a great idea for a party! Scrolled on down and saw your decorations for the event! You have a great eye for details, everything was so pretty, creative and unique!

Thanks for stopping in to see me! ...and for the sweet comments! Hope you'll visit again! ~Rhonda :)

Connie said...

Wow! That looks like a lot of work! I didn't know the Bouef Borgonine was 47 steps...I didn't count them when I made it but it took a long time.

Denise said...

I just saw your tablescape below (I'm still going through the list on Susan's blog as I like to see them all). Your party sounds wonderful, and your table was gorgeous. What a beautiful group of ladies too :) I love cooking, wish I had friends I could do this with, but no one I know would want to spend 10 hours cooking bread!
Was this the first Julia party you had? Do you do other cooking parties? it sounds so much fun.

Bumble Bee Cottage said...

Your vegetable terrine looked fabulous, as did all the other delicious courses at your dinner party. I had read about the ‘Julie and Julia’ movie a few months ago on other blogs, but it has only come to the cinema on this side of the world recently. I’m from Australia and so have never heard of Julia Child before now but with so many food based blogs raving about her I think I may need to investigate further. Your themed dinner party is great idea; well done for such an innovative and fun evening.

Shellbelle said...

All I can say is WOW! I didn't participate in Foodie Friday this week, but I'm glad I had another reason to visit you today (more on that in a minute).

I love your Julia Child Dinner Party from beginning to end! The hats are amazing and I copied the instructions.

Honey, if I had known you needed a book I would have lent you one of mine.

But I came by to tell you that I included a link to your Group Service post from last month to my post today. I hope you don't mind. I'm on a mission and you so inspired me that day.

New York Says Thank You