Mother’s Day Private Chef Dinner

Chef Sean and I had the honor of cooking a three course dinner for clients to celebrate Mother’s Day this year in downtown Boulder. He was in charge of everything except the Rhubarb Pie, which I successfully put together the day before.

I set the table for four while he was busy cooking. The first course was delectable- Crab cakes with a watercress, mizuna, and apple salad and a champagne mustard vinaigrette.

The second course was planned for the Texans visiting family in Boulder: Steak and potatoes.

Chef Sean made twice baked potatoes filled with pancetta, roasted garlic, parmesan, ricotta, and green onion served on top of sautéed spinach and chard from the Boulder Farmer’s Market. The steaks were topped with a relish of roasted peppers and pickled chilies (he pickled the chilies last summer during pepper season at the market).

We ended with my Rhubarb Pie.

It’s always fun cooking for hungry clients. Please let us know what we can cook for you!

Cheers~

Personal Chef Services

Hello Friends!

A Bolder Table started as a food blog in 2009. My goal was to compile my recipes in one place, and it’s evolved into a space where I express my thoughts on food, share recipes, talk about restaurants, and help promote my favorite local foodies.

When I started blogging, I had no idea I’d meet and marry a chef. After more than twenty years working in professional kitchens, Sean is making the leap to being a full time personal chef. We’re really excited to spend more time together, to stop eating dinner at 11:30pm after he returns home from work, and to help make other peoples’ lives easier and more delicious.

We’re now transitioning to a personal chef service, so our blog posts will soon migrate to the “blog” section. We’ll continue to fill them with easy to follow recipes and keep you updated on anything food-related we’re excited about here in Boulder and across the Front Range of Colorado. We’ll also keep you up to date on the delicious meals he’s making for some hungry locals.

We are happy to unveil our new personal chef services. Stay tuned for the updated website!

Cheers!

Megan & Sean

Fire Cider

We received a small bottle of something called Fire Cider for Christmas. I’d never heard of this before, so I immediately opened it up for a taste.

WOW! It’s incredible. It’s a savory, tangy, spicy vinegar concoction believed to have health benefits if drunk regularly. The ingredients were straightforward, I just bought a food processor (finally!), so I figured I’d start making my own so I can consume this daily.

What you see is what you get: Onion, orange, horseradish, ginger, lemon, garlic, habañero, turmeric, and apple cider vinegar.

I quartered and sliced the orange and lemon, and de-stemmed and sliced the peppers. Other than that, I peeled the other ingredients and shred them in the food processor. Add it all to a jar, add some peppercorns, cover in vinegar, and wait one month.

Here’s what I learned from the inter-webs: Plastic wrap prevents the lid from being corroded from the vinegar. It needs to be shaken up daily while it’s infusing over 3-6 weeks. Bragg raw unfiltered apple cider vinegar with the ‘mother’ is the ideal vinegar to use for fire cider. When it’s ready to be consumed, strain it in a colander with cheese cloth to squeeze every last drop and then transfer to a sterile jar and add local honey to make it as sweet as you like. It can be stored in the fridge for up to one year, though that will never happen in my house.

I’ll update this post in February when it’s done. I can’t wait!

Roasted Cinderella Pumpkin

Chef asked me to swing by the Munson Farm Stand for a Cinderella pumpkin he could roast and preserve for the winter. I LOVE pumpkin, so I was really happy he wanted to preserve some this year. I usually buy a few pie pumpkins to make my pumpkin peanut curry soup, and they’re much smaller- maybe smaller than a soccer ball. The selection of Cinderella pumpkins at Munson’s Farm Stand was impressive, and this one was larger than two of my heads put together.

Sean almost effortlessly sliced it in half. I would have needed a saw, I think.

Scooped out the seeds…

Drizzled olive oil on top and then some salt and pepper…

And then they BARELY fit into our miniature oven. We live in 600 sq ft, and our kitchen appliances reflect that. But, we shoved it in there and made it work.

It roasted at 450 for more than an hour and didn’t quite come out as brown as we had hoped, but that’s sometimes what happens with miniature appliances- the end product isn’t as perfect as it could be. It still tasted great, so that’s really all that matters.

We let it cool and then scooped out A LOT of pumpkin.

Sean then pureed it in the Vitamix, poured it into jars, and processed it to save it for a wintery day. It’s truly wonderful to be married to a chef who likes to cook at home.

Perfect Potatoes

There’s a technique that creates a perfect potato (in my opinion) which, upon trying it, has changed the way I cook potatoes at home. It doesn’t matter if it’s a red potato, Yukon gold, sweet potato, yam… just start with a potato, follow my steps, and see how it turns out. I’ll replicate this in future posts with different potatoes, but for this posting I had local Colorado red potatoes on hand.

First, par-boil them in salted water until a knife can pierce them without force.

Then, take them out of the water and let them sit until they’re cool enough to touch. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

When a potato is par-boiled, it’s not quite cooked evenly through, and you can see the difference in doneness when it’s sliced in half.

For this particular evening, I sliced the almost fist-sized potatoes in half, sliced the halves, and then cut them again in half to 2-inch long pieces. You could slice them into any length or width you want, but your oven roasting time might then vary.

I tossed the potatoes with garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper, and spread them on a baking sheet.

After 10-15 minutes in the oven they’ll be sizzling, or as I like to say, “talking to you,” at which point it’s OK to check to see how brown they are on the underside. When they’re looking crispy, I flip them, repeat the process, and voila- a perfect potato.

They have the crust of something fried with the creamy interior of a french fry done correctly, yet are tossed in just a few tablespoons of olive oil. They’re not just a guilty pleasure of mine, but something I’m really proud of figuring out while chef’s out working and I’m preparing dinner.