Getting everything to coalesce at one time for a dinner is hard enough to accomplish but trying to remember to take pictures of it all for the sake of some lame-ass blog adds another dimension of distraction that often proves detrimental to both the meal and the blog.
I made a list. This helps and in some ways this is satisfying—ticking off things as they are completed—in others it simply reminds me that my mind is failing and I need a list in order to keep it all straight. Granted this was a more-complicated-than-usual meal. Soup, salad, gnocchi, beans and the goddam fish, followed by the marquise au chocolat. The soup and salad would have sufficed. They were pretty and delicious. The fish was a mess, the green beans under cooked. The gnocchi was nice but the marquise au chocolat, please. This is Dorie Greenspan’s go-to New Year’s Eve dessert…I don’t get it (for more information on Dorie, click here). It was fine but what a whole lotta hoopla about cold chocolate. More on that later.
In the meantime, in the midst of the swirling mass of confusion during the assemblage of the plated meal, I did not get a picture of said plated meal and had to make do with a pic mid consumption taken by one of the guests. Not only did I not take the picture I neglected to nap the fish with the butter lemon caper sauce that makes it sole meuniere! Goddammit.
I regretfully sluiced the sauce down the drain the next morning and made a mental note not to make fish again . . . as if fish was the problem. I am fully aware that I am the problem.
