Reminder: today, Saturday, is the LAST DAY TO REGISTER for the Potato Pandemonium dinner at the Possum Trot Tropical Fruit Nursery. Seats are selling out fast! Don’t dawdle and miss out! This is a unique offering that may not happen again. In addition to the dinner, Robert will give you a tour of his rustic 40 acre property and give a cooking lesson using tropical ingredients — all part of the Possum Experience. Click here to rsvp and pay in advance.
Peruvian purple potatoes, some of the stars of the show.
A group of folks from Bee Heaven Farm gathered a few nights ago at Possum Trot Tropical Fruit Nursery for a test tasting of several dishes on the Pandemonium menu this coming Wednesday night. Robert Barnum was working on fine-tuning flavors, timing and presentation. He and his two sous chefs, who usually cook at the hostel in Florida City, had food coming fast and furious from two kitchens.
Chips made from red, white and blue potatoes.
The vichyssoise was made with Peruvian purple potatoes, which gave it a delicate lavender hue.
Topping the vichyssoise with fresh garlic chives and multicolor chips.
First up was lavender vichyssoise, light and creamy, topped with fresh snipped garlic chives and crispy multicolor chips hot from the fryer. The crispy saltiness of the chips was balanced nicely by the mild smoothness of the soup. The consensus was the chips were the best we’d eaten. All of them disappeared before the end of the night. Crunch! The soup wasn’t too bad either.
Potato salad with smoked eggs and carambola relish.
The potato salad with carambola relish included wood fire smoked eggs which gave the salad a certain depth (the same smoked eggs available at farmers market), and was dressed with homemade mayonnaise made with olive oil.
The souffles fell after they came out of the oven, but we gobbled them up just the same. A bit of onion and garlic gave the them a flavor reminiscent of potato pancakes. No worries, Robert is working on lighter, less-likely-to-fall souffles for the big night. (No picture of this. You do not need to see a fallen souffle.)
Some of the guests in postprandial contentment. Left to right: Robert, Emily, Jamie, Dan, Glen, Nick, Bernardo and Christian.
An assortment of home-brewed tropical fruit wines, including lychee (nothing at all like Schnebly’s, my apologies to Peter) and bignay (or antidesma, a tropical berry) made by Robert himself will be available at the dinner. We settled for jug of mead that Dan brought, given to him by his beekeeper.
Emily was mesmerized by watching the special candle burn on her potato cake.
It was also farm apprentice Emily’s last night in Miami, and we feasted in honor of her hard work and good humor. She and her rabbit Homer are going back to Martha’s Vineyard, where she will start her own farm growing vegetables especially for a restaurant there. Good luck Emily!
Your table awaits!
The pesky possum pounced on pudgy potatoes with playful peelers, and promised a profusion of pleasures for the palate prepared from plenteous pots.
Redland Rambles 