That ain't Irish

We're having a few people over for dinner on Saturday. We've been eating lots of Thai lately and Japanese is now a weekly staple so the menu is Asian inspired. As always, there is a planned menu and then there is what happens during the 24 hours leading up to hosting a meal. We will see if I can find all the ingredients I want to make these dishes. And it's not just finding them, it's finding them in good quality. We will see.

St. Patrick's Day Dinner for Six

(If St. Patrick lived in South East Asia somewhere)

Hawaiian Ahi Poke

with avocado, cucumber, daikon and shiso leaf

Spicy Thai Green Papaya Salad

Vietnamese Grilled Steak Salad

with cilantro, basil, mint, and peanuts over Napa cabbage

Shanghai Stir Fried Noodles

with red peppers and mushrooms

Homemade Green Tea Ice Cream

I still haven't bought the wines. I'm putting myself into my wine guy's hands. (Joe at http://manhattanfinewines.com/)

Happy grocery shopping!

This is Debbie

This is Debbie and I in the back of my old Explorer on the morning of our first catering adventure. It was a birthday party for a five year old girl. We made pizzas in the tiny kitchen in Lomita and Debbie had created a fantastic antipasta spread. I don't think we made any money, we were just checking out the catering thing. We both hated it. But it was a fun day and we helped out a friend of mine.

The Tale of the New York Trip (part 1)

We had never vacationed in New York City together. We had a layover once on a long flight and managed to squeeze in dinner at Gramercy Tavern and live Jazz at some club, but that was the extent of my New York experience.

For my big Four-Oh, we decided to plan a long weekend in the late fall. But where to eat? So many choices, so few vacation days.

Daniel
Per Se
Mesa Grill
Les Halles
wd~50
Balthazar

The list kept growing. We had to weed through them all and plan accordingly. We called Per Se 3 months to the day before the Friday of our stay. By the time I got through on the phone, only lunch reservations were available. Now that may not seem like such a bad thing. But we had been to French Laundry only once and it was for lunch. I really wanted the dinner experience. I asked the nice reservationista if there happened to be anything available late the night before (the night we were flying in). Yes, she said that someone had called in and cancelled a 10pm reservation and that it was available. I snagged it. Our flight was scheduled to arrive around 6pm. Ten pm eastern time is seven pm pacific time, which was just perfect.

As the trip got closer we booked other dinners, wd~50 (Wylie Dufresne, uber-tech-chef); Daneil (Daniel Boulud, class act French chef) and bought tickets to the Sunday matinee of Spamalot.

Well travelled friends recommended the SoHo Grand hotel. We booked a corner room. Two weeks later I saw that the Oprah show's designer guy picked it as his favorite place to stay in NY. We were set.

Two weeks out we found out that the well traveled wife would be in NY during our stay. We added one to our reservation at wd~50 for Friday night.

A coworker of Bruce's who telecommutes and lives in NY wanted to arrange to meet us for dinner one night. We offered him our last night in the city, Sunday, after Spamalot. We were looking forward to meeting them in person.