This was another one of those nights.
Some friends stop by with some serious, premium-quality ingredients and a whole lot of beer.
They know I cannot resist the ingredients. I will drink, they will drink, and I will stand in the kitchen for 6 hours strait pumping out one dish after another until we are all fat and retarded.
Here is a brief photo tour of the food I threw down last night.

This is a simple seared scallop with a warm bacon/lemon dressing. The scallop is being lifted off of a pool of bacon fat by a platform of crispy bacon. Then it's topped with more bacon, lemon zest and parsley. This was basically a starter.
FOOD PORN PASTA

Perhaps you saw Eric Ripert make this pasta dish on Bourdain's "FOOD PORN" special recently. I basically tried to re-create this dish. Actually I did... I just didn't have quite as much Osetra Caviar... But we did have SOME.. and we did have uni... So this is how it went.

I started by pushing the urchin through a fine mesh strainer along with a stick of room-temp butter.

Scraping this mixture off the bottom of the strainer, I lumped it together into a bowl and put it in the fridge to cool down just a little. Meanwhile I heated a couple of tablespoons of water in a sauce pan until it was boiling. I turned the heat down and a few tablespoons at a time, whisked in the uni/butter mixture until I had a smooth emulsified sauce.
This was tossed with some noodles and parm. Seasoned with salt and pepper and plated. A portion of Osetra was placed on top of each pasta nest and the dish was done. It was not quite as saucy as Ripert's version but we called this the "economy version"... even though we agreed that this small portion could easily go for $30 in a restaurant.

Clams n' Pork

These were a couple of different kinds of clams. I know there were littlenecks but I do not remember the name of the larger brown/yellow shelled clams we had here. I did eat one of them raw and it was salty, fresh and delicious.
This was a fatty, naughty dish made from a ton of Genoa salami and sausage which were rendered until crispy and then tossed with clams which were cooked in garlic, butter and beer. This was a simple, flavorful bounty to be picked at and mopped up with a lot of crusty bread.
Much beer was consumed during the eating of this course.
Very Fresh Mackerel

We had a single whole mackerel with which I was not sure what to do at first. It was a pretty small fish and I was feeding 8 people so I decided to do a little 1-bite amuse kind of thing with it. I just portioned it into pieces like the one seen above and cooked them skin side down in grape seed oil until they were very crispy. I then added butter to the pan and basted only a little over the 'still raw' topside until it was just barely cooked. I plated these crispy little bites crispy-side up on top of a lemon and then sprinkled the entire plate with Szechuan peppercorns.
It was just one lemony bite of sexy, rare, crispy fish.

Tandoori Paste Braised Chicken

Here we have some chicken which was rubbed with tandoori paste and allowed to marinate for several hours. I then pan seared the individual pieces until the skin was crispy and the paste was charred onto the outside. I allowed this to simmer in a broth of more tandoori paste, San Marzano tomatoes and water for a couple of hours and then finished it with some cream. Simple, but good flavor combo for sure. This was yet another dish that went well with bread.
EAT THESE EYEBALLS
(we did anyway)

These guys were stuffed with garlic, ginger, lemon and lime leaves, rubbed with Tom Yum Paste and set into this very hot pan... Then thrown under the broiler and ignored until they were done.
When they came out, their little fins were standing strait up as if to say "Over here!!!.. We are done!!!... Pop our eyeballs out and eat them!!!"
So I sprinkled them with black vinegar and Sriracha and we all just stood around them pulling off pieces of the skin and meat for consumption...

The eyeball I got had a crunchy center. Not sure if I liked it. But that was a small disappointment given the glorious nature of the rest of this evening.
Let's do it again next week shall we?