The Dessertation, and on giving thanks

This past spring, I received my Ph.D. Here's the victory photo with one of my dissertation advisors, from graduation in June: (and you'd better appreciate this, because I hate being in photographs!)

It's taken me a long time to write about my PhD celebrations because, quite frankly, the experience of grad school and (more crucially) the ensuing academic job market is a bit traumatic -- even if everything turns out okay in the end, and you find yourself with one of those elusive and coveted tenure-track faculty positions in an amazing R1 department and location. Anyways.

One does not achieve a PhD and job-hood alone. It took at least two freakin' villages, if not more, to rear me into the academic that I turned out to be. So, as an expression of gratitude to those who helped me through the process, I threw what I am not-so-humbly going to call a grand party. To be exact: a ten course, tasting menu-style dinner, entirely of desserts, inspired by the past seven years. A dinner worthy of being the capstone to an entire chapter of life. In short: epicness.

(Most photographs in this post are courtesy of Toni Bird Photography. With exception of the phone photos.)

(Above: place cards were a print out of an article by each guest, which alarmed me as to how erudite the crowd was!)

My friend Rob kindly let me host the dinner--aka: "the Dessertation" (because we linguists love our puns)--at his beautiful home in San Francisco. I don't think he knew what he was signing himself and his kitchen up for! Because to do a French Laundry-type dinner at home requires... well, let's just say that his kitchen (and dishwasher) got quite the workout.

I continually planned and revised the menu for months and months beforehand, and did serious detailed prep for about a week leading up to the event: menu planning, dishware and cutlery sourcing (12 times 10 courses worth of dishware!--thank goodness for my prop closet), ingredient buying, menu print design, food prep. Then we basically hunkered down and cooked for 48 hours straight. On the day of, Rob's talented friend took us, bleary-eyed at 5am, to the San Francisco Flower Market, and then preceded to put together the most breathtaking flower arrangements for the event, based on my favorite flowers (tuberose, peonies) and my requested colors (dark blue for Berkeley, white for Stanford, dark green for myself). The guy is a serious flower whisperer.

Each course in the menu was designed as part of a narrative of my grad school time, and each was carefully balanced such that there would be no sugar or carb overload. Not an easy feat, I tell you! (I also prepped some savory finger food and soups on the side for people to snack on.) I was so busy plating and hosting that I didn't take a single photograph of the food at all! So I hope you don't mind that what I'm sharing here today are some of my friend Toni's photos, and then my planning sketches--how I diagrammed every component of every dish while designing the menu.

Without further ado, may I present, the Dessertation: in defense of desserts for dinner.

First course - Aperitif/Amuse Bouche

For the amuse, I wanted to start on a really optimistic note, a snapshot of the sort of euphoria one experiences at the moment of graduation and achievement. Hendrick's gin is something that I learned to love in grad school, from my various travels to Scotland. And with its fresh, floral undertones, I felt like it was the perfect way to kick off the night. The gin and tonic jello shot was lightly flavored with a dash of rosewater, served on a slice of English cucumber, and topped with a delicately crunchy sugared rose petal that my dad picked from his garden at my childhood home. Also, jello shots were a great vehicle for the aperitif component, because who doesn't want to see a bunch of prominent academics take jello shots?

Below: sugared rose petals drying; plating of the gin & tonic shots, with cucumber slices.

Second course

The second course represented "grad school," generally. It was super dark, with dark chocolate and dabs of espresso reduction. It was bitter, with concentrated fresh grapefruit flavoring the dark chocolate truffle. It was tart, with a dab of plain yoghurt at the bottom. But despite all of that, it was surprisingly good for you, with a candied purple carrot curl on top.

Below: purple carrot; the final dish. Also, little known fact: candying a purple carrot slice makes it sort of look like bacon. Now you know!

Third course - Appetizer

In my book, everyone is allowed at least one vice during their dissertation days. For some, that's coffee, or binge-watching Netflix, or extreme (lack of) exercise. For me, I took up a soda habit, which I hadn't done since before college. But given that I didn't drink coffee much, Coca-cola became my go-to, desperate-for-fast-caffeine-and-sugar fix. So, the third course is inspired by all things Coke: cherries and vanilla. This was a fun dessert to design architecturally, since it featured a block of dark cherry ice cream frozen within a shell of Coke. Then, it was topped with some vanilla-almond milk "air", which froze upon contact with the frozen Coke shell to become sort of a stable foam that you'd find on a glass of ice cold soda. Yay, molecular gastronomy!

Fourth course - Entrée

 
A stress-relief outlet throughout grad school was playing in classical music trios. In my current trio group made up of linguists, we've been playing a lot of Hungarian, folksy-inspired music, including Dvořák's Dumky Trio. This recurring theme made me think of the Austrian dessert dumplings germknödel that I had once with Emma when I visited her in Oxford during grad school. These are soft, fluffy, steamed dumplings that are served in a poppyseed-butter sauce, with apricot jam. In my version, the germknödel dumplings were miniaturized, and served with a lavender-poached, in-season Blenheim apricot with a poppyseed and vanilla bean crème anglaise. (Also, sorry about the horrible pun.)

Fifth course - Palate cleanser

For a palate cleanser, I wanted to incorporate an element of savory, so I turned to a beetroot-cranberry sorbet. The rest of the dessert is inspired by summertime and the time I spent in Hawai'i, which of course is sort of like a palate cleanser reprieve for each school year: guava, toasted coconut, and tranluscent candied lime.

Sixth course - Main

The main course comes from my pièce de résistance dessert--that is, the best dessert that I have ever made during my grad school years, called the "Random Forest Cake." The Random Forest Cake came to being during my third year of grad school, when we were in the midst of hosting a workshop on quantitative linguistics at Stanford. One of the honored guest speakers was from the Black Forest in Germany, and so there was a plan to make a black forest cake for the conference dinner dessert. At the same time, however, I was in the middle of writing (i.e., scrambling to write) my own talk for the workshop, and our analysis that I was supposed to present had just been, at the last minute, totally ripped to shreds in the practice rounds. To save our work, our lab director suggested I investigate a recently introduced method of data mining called "Random Forests," which I proceeded to teach myself and learn faster than I had ever learned anything in my life before. (It paid off, and the paper (together with my coauthor) went on to win a national presentation award.) Anyways, suffice it to say that the night before the conference rolled around, I was in no state to make a black forest cake, so I opened my pantry and refrigerator and grabbed the first ingredients that I saw. And so, the "Random" Forest Cake was born, made of dense dark chocolate flourless cake, atop a tart sauce of passionfruit, topped with barely whipped crème fraîche cream (because I was too exhausted to whip it good :)), and a sprinkling of smoked sea salt. Perhaps it was exhaustion or perhaps it was a triumph, but the cake was so good that everyone at the conference dinner ate it in complete and total silence--something that never happens at academic conferences!

So, for my Dessertation dinner, the Random Forest Cake of course had to make an encore apperance as the main course. I kicked it up here one more notch by adding a dash of popping crystals in with the smoked sea salt--gotta keep it random and continuously surprising!

Seventh course - "Salad & Cheese"

This seventh course, titled "Thanksgiving," turned out to be my favorite course of the night. On paper, the dish sounds totally insane--salad and dessert?!--but let me tell you, I swear on my PhD that this "salad" is utterly sublime. In a single bite, there is creamy and crunchy and toasted and sweet and savory and fresh. The "salad" was inspired by my grad school tradition of cooking Thanksgiving dinners in Los Angeles, which started out simple but year after year became more and more elaborate. One thing that my best friend always requested for Thanksgivings was goat cheese mixed with garlic and chives, and each year, I would think up a new way to serve it. We moved from simple bread and crackers to--in the final Thanksgiving--a spoonful of garlic-chive goat cheese in a small boat of Belgian endive, topped with Buddha's hand-yuzu marmalade. In this dessert-inspired version for the dessertation, I took out the garlic/chives and added a trio of hazelnut tones: a brush of hazelnut oil, a crunch of toasted hazelnuts, and an airy creaminess of Nutella "dust". I've made this "salad" again and again since as an appetizer course for dinner parties, and it's always a hit! The recipe is included for you below.... for Thanksgiving? :)

Eighth course - Dessert

One faculty member once told me that I am one of the incredibly rare few who have done all their schooling (college, grad school) and then gotten a faculty position, all within a sixty-mile radius. I am so lucky to be in such a situation, and so thankful, too, since I feel like a good lot of my identity is ingrained with a deep love for California. For the dessert course, I wanted to make an homage to California, so I knew it had to be a blue and gold cake: homemade tayberry and olallieberry jam filling with a lemon-thyme cake base. On top, I painted the cake in the style of Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series, which are sort of these amazing colour distillations of the essence of California scapes. I'm also quite fond of the Ocean Park series because one of my advisors had a print of #54 in her office, which I spent lots of time staring at while trying to avoid awkward grad student eye contact when I felt like I wasn't measuring up!

Ninth course - Mignardises

I liked the idea of bringing the evening to a slow close with a very simple, straightforward dessert, because sometimes in the complexity and stressfulness of life, simplicity is comfort. For the mignardises, I made whole wheat chocolate chip cookies that were studded with toasted wheat germ, and milk and dark Tcho chocolates. It's a chocolate chip cookie recipe I've been working on perfecting for the last three years of grad school, slowly upping and lowering flour and sugar contents, changing butter ratios, tweaking chocolate ratios, swapping out different types of flour. The cookies were served with a small shot of really good fresh whole milk. Because even big whig academics need comfort food sometimes.

Tenth course - Nuts & Fruit

For the final course of the evening, I wanted to leave off with a dessert inspired by lessons I had learned in grad school. Before grad school, I had never made pecan pie before, so finally our grad advisor took it upon herself to teach me how to make this staple pie of American celebrations. We also had a lot of discussions over the years of how I didn't like plums, and each plum season, she would bring to me a new variety of plum from the farmers' market until I learned to appreciate the fruits' unique blend of sweet, clear flesh and tart seed and skin. This dessert was a sort of nod to all of my teachers over the years, as a way of demonstrating that I'd taken their lessons, however small, to heart.

Acknowledgements are always my favorite part of dissertations to read, but it was even better that I was able to bring mine to edible life through a meal for those I wanted to thank!


Read on for recipe....

Candy Salad and Devil's Food Affogato, and a Simple Halloween Menu

Didya miss me?  ;-)  It's very unlike me to be absent from the blog for long and to miss my usual weekly Monday midnight/Tuesday early morning posting time.  Alas-- however, this week, life just caught up with me, and I had to throw my hands up and just let something go.  It turns out that juggling concurrent classes and research at two universities simultaneously (not to mention the commute hours hopping back and forth across the San Francisco Bay) and attempting to squeeze two years' worth of graduate work into a single semester while still trying to maintain some semblance of sanity isn't such a hot idea.  Yeah.  But, don't worry about me--I'm having a ball doing it all (seriously) and absolutely love it.  I know.  I'm crazy.

But wait--you're going to think I'm even crazier when you see the recipe I'm going to try my hardest to convince you about today: candy salad.  (Boy, I sure hope your kids aren't reading this one, because you might hate me if they pick up on this idea!)  This was a completely accidental discovery on my part, but it's turned out to be an absolutely wonderful one.

Here's how it all started.  When one of our friends came over for our Halloween dinner, he brought along a bag of Skittles.  (My policy for Halloween parties is "I make the food, you bring the candy.")  Now, Skittles aren't my usual candy of choice.  In fact, I don't even remember the last time I had Skittles or voluntarily sought them out.  But there they were, a pail of them sitting on the kitchen table amongst the fixings for dinner.  So, as I was putting together the salad I was making, my hands instinctively hovered over the colorful bowl of candies, reached in, and tossed a few into the salad.  I'm no stranger to unusual and untraditional combinations of savory and sweet, but even I was skeptical at first about what I'd just done.  But the minute I took the first bite and sunk my teeth through the leafy greens and into a burst of chewy candy flavor, I was sold.  Skittles, it turns out, are the perfect finishing touch to a salad of spicy wild arugula leaves, accented with leaves of deeply fragrant purple basil, crunchy shaved fennel,  and nuggets of juicy pomegranate seeds.  Skittles contribute the final texture and flavor to tie everything together: the slight toothiness in the candy's center and the bright sweetness to balance out the herby taste of the fennel, arugula, and basil and slightest tart to enhance and highlight the sweetness of the pomegranate seeds.  The key, of course, is a small, light-handed sprinkling of Skittles--just enough so that it brings a bit of nuanced novelty and surprise to an otherwise straightforward autumn salad.

a Simple Halloween Menu

Candy salad

wild arugula, shaved fennel, purple basil leaves, pomegranate seeds, skittles

Garlic-baked chicken drumsticks

with paprika, fresh rosemary and thyme, lavender salt, and worchestershire

Sweet potato and squid ink gnocchi

with a nutmeg and gorgonzola cream sauce

"Heaven and Hell"

devil's food chocolate cake affogato

For dessert, I did a play on a heaven and hell theme, especially since I had this new devil's food cake recipe I'd been wanting to try out for some time now.  For the actual dinner, I served both devil's and angel food cake with plain ice cream, but the day after, I had some more devil's food cake left over, and it turned out to go beautifully in a devil's food, espresso, and vanilla ice cream affogato--so much so that I wish I'd served it this way instead as dessert on Halloween!

The cake, from the new book Baked Explorations (one of their pastry chefs was on Top Chef: Just Desserts!), is nice and dark and chocolate-y, yet still surprisingly light and fluffy and airy--and moist, too.  I don't know how well it pairs with the frosting suggested in the book, but it goes so well with vanilla ice cream--its crumbs sort of melting into chocolate goodness in the cream--that I'm not sure I'd ever serve it any other way!  Hot espresso poured over it all makes it definitely a heaven-worthy dessert.  (okay, I couldn't resist! :P)

Anyways, I hope you all had wonderful and fun Halloweens!  Happy November, everyone!


[Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of Baked Explorations to review but was under no obligations to post about it.  As always, I will never tell you about something that I don't love myself.]


Read on for recipes...

Thyme for Watermelon + Strawberries

If there's anything that is quintessentially "summer" for me, it's watermelon.  Once I have my first watermelon, I know that summer is finally here.  (Similarly, the disappearance of watermelons from the markets marks the end of summer for me, too--but that's sad and months away, so why worry about it now? ;-))

My family used to end all of our summer dinners with a big bowl of chopped watermelon, ice cold from the refrigerator.  Usually we would eat it plain, but sometimes, as a treat for me, my mom would give me a bowlful of Chinese sour plum powder in which to dip my watermelon chunks, and I absolutely loved that!  Though Chinese sour plums are a bit of an acquired taste for most, I just loved the juxtaposition between sweet and sour and salty between the mouth-puckering powder and the juicy watermelon.  So, as I started cooking, I started looking for the sweet and savory interplay that I loved from the watermelon + sour plums in other forms, of which one of my favorite is the watermelon, strawberry, and thyme salad with balsamic vinegar and ricotta salata.

Alright, so before everyone thinks I've gone bonkers to mix strawberries and watermelon into a savory dish, let me try to first convince you that I'm not crazy.  After all, salty+sweet has always been a great combo in savory dishes (and especially Asian ones): case in point, sweet and salty pork, or sweet walnut prawns, or the beloved orange-flavored chicken.  I even believe that the whole current let's-put-bacon-on-our-desserts craze is merely a manifestation of our desire to have a full flavor profile ranging from the sweet to the savory in one bite.  And this salad, if I might say so myself, delivers just that.  Between the fragrant earthiness of the fresh thyme leaves, the sour-sweetness of the balsamic vinegar, and the salty creaminess of the ricotta salata shavings, the traditionally saved-for-dessert strawberries and watermelon really come into their own, with everything else helping to bring out the sweet juiciness of the fruit itself.

This dish is also an insanely easy one to make and a perfect appetizer salad for a summer BBQ or picnic.  The longer the watermelon and strawberry chunks marinate in their light dressing of balsamic vinegar and thyme, the more the flavors really meld and combine, so preparing this the morning of a party or BBQ and then sticking it in the refrigerator until service really helps to make this dish even better.  All you have to do at the last minute is top the salad with some fresh shavings of ricotta salata, and voila! an easy yet super-unexpected way to start your meal.

Of course, this is a dessert blog, so I couldn't very well leave you without a way to end your meal, too, right?  To take a cue from my family's post-dinner watermelon-eating, nothing is better than watermelon except ice cold watermelon.  So, it's sort of no wonder that, ever since making watermelon sorbetto last summer, I've loved the idea of watermelon in ice form.  I also really liked the pairing of fresh thyme with watermelon and strawberries in savory form, so I translated it into a dessert: watermelon and strawberry granita with thyme-infused whipped cream.

Granita is one of my favorite things to make around the beginning of summer, which coincides (quite unfortunately), at my school, with finals week.  Since I'm stuck indoors furiously writing final papers when the weather is just starting to hit 80 degrees with no clouds outside, I always hanker for a bit of summer indoors as well.  Enter the granita, the perfect dessert to make when you're stuck inside, because, though it's ridiculously easy to make, you do have to baby-sit it for about six hours at a time, stopping every thirty minutes to scrape up the ice crystals forming around the edges of the pan until you reach a lighter-than-air and ultra-fluffy ice.  (Thirty minutes being about my attention span anyways, so it works out to have forced breaks from work to stir--and sneak tastes of--the in-progress granita.)

As much time as it takes to make granita, this one is well worth it.  The strawberries and watermelon make a refreshingly delicious ice--especially to eat on those hot summer nights sitting outside on the porch, and the hint of rosewater that I mixed in adds a slight and sweet mysterious aroma to the whole thing.  The thyme whipped cream on top makes the whole thing turn out like a sophisticated, grown-up version of my favorite orange creamsicles, with the herbal creaminess melting lusciously into a spoonful of flaky ice.  Try also freezing the cream right on top of the granita, which makes for an excellently creamy and cold summer treat.

So, with this watermelon, I now officially declare summer here!


Read on for recipes...