Chimichurri Sauce

Way back when I threw a South American themed birthday party for a dear friend of mine in her brownstone basement apartment in Boston’s South End.  She loved flank steak and I’d decided to fit that cut of beef into the theme with the addition of the Argentinean-inspired Chimichurri Sauce I’d seen in a then recent issue of Fine Cooking.    The party was good, but the sauce was great. Both she and I have been making it now for 10 years.

In Argentina, Chimichurri is typically served with parrillada, a mix of grill beef steaks, chops and sausages.  But in my house, it’s spread on everything including roasted potatoes, grilled chicken and vegetables, and leftover pork-loin and crusty bread sandwiches.  With summer herbs in abundance, I’ve been fortunate enough to have plenty of it around lately.

You can certainly pulse all of the ingredients in a food processor, but there are both taste and textural benefits to chopping each ingredient separately and then letting them meld together over a period of hours.

This recipe makes jsut about two cups, should be served at room temperature and can be refrigerated and used up within a week of making it.  I’m not sure if it freezes well as it gets used up pretty quickly in my house.  Should you freeze some for the winter as an experiment, please report back on your results.

Chimichurri Sauce

Ingredients

½ cup flat leaf parsley, chopped finely

¼ cup fresh herbs of your choice (oregano, basil, thyme, rosemary), chopped finely

5 garlic cloves, minced

1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt

½ teaspoon red chili flakes (chopped fresh chilies work well too)

½ teaspoon black pepper

1 teaspoon lemon zest

3 tablespoons white wine vinegar

Pinch of sugar

1 cup of good olive oil

Method

Mix all ingredients and let them sit for at least two hours before serving.

I had one of those dining experiences two nights ago at an eclectic deli/bistro called 103 (the restaurant’s street number on Unthank Road in Norwich, England).  At this place the chefs, all veterans of celebrated London kitchens, cook interesting combinations of food that they themselves like to eat in an atmosphere fluid enough to suit each table individually. Joining Andy and me were dear friends, Julie and Nick, the latter expertly matching each of our small plate selections with a wine from his cellar.

I won’t detail all nine plates, as that would be cruel to those who did not partake, but I can offer up some highlights.

Pork rillette with all fixings

The star of the first set of plates to arrive was a pork rillette.  The mild seasonings of the coarse pate were intensified by the  pig parts used in this dish: the belly and the neck, both full of flavorful fat that give the pate an equally meaty and creamy texture. It arrived in a tall heap on one corner of a square slate palette also dotted  with elements intended for use in building the perfect bite: a long swath of Dijon mustard, gnarled sweet Spanish peppers, bread-and-butter-style pickled courgette, traditional cornichons, and crusty bread.  The wine Nick paired with it was a 2004 Remelluri, a white rioja.  He’s the wine expert by trade, so I can’t begin to describe the nuances of this wine except to say that it had a fruity acidity that balanced out the rich rillette.

Other plates in this round included an okra and onion bhaji, which was interesting to me because they shredded the okra lengthwise, a technique that seemed to keep the fritters lighter than straight onion ones I’ve had in the past.  

Also on offer was a very sizable pork and crab spring roll with Thai slaw. It was duly complemented by the zesty citrus finish of the 2007 Moss Wood semillon Nick pulled out of his bag.

We stayed with the Semillon, too, for a subsequent set of dishes that bounced from Spain to the Middle East and back to Thailand.  Our chorizo was just that: high quality links the size of the top section of your thumb, fried in a bit of oil and stuck with a toothpick for easy access.  You don’t mess with perfection. 

Minted watermelon salad with Krembeyaz cheese

The Middle East was well represented by a minted watermelon salad with a pomegranate dressing and a cheese new to me:  Krembeyaz, a Turkish curd resembling feta, only  creamier and not as salty.

We also received a flash-fried squid dish that had a very smoky, nutty air about it.  It wasn’t a taste exactly, but it arrived in that quick flash of aroma that reaches into your mouth as you openup to take a bite.  I tried to guess what kind of oil, or nut, or liquid smoke might yield such a tasteful scent, butgave up when our server explained there were a total of 36 ingredients in the dish.

The “main” dishes of this tasting menu were elevated British comfort

Pork filet on mashed white beans

 foods, in that they centered on lamb and pork. Nick paired a stellar 2005 Yerring Station shiraz/viognier with our lamb selection: a slow cooked shoulder served in an “open moussaka” formation. The chunks of lamb sat atop rich slices of aubergine but under a silky feta-based white sauce.

The pork filet had a similar stacking, this time with mashed white beans on the bottom and sweet Spanish piquillo peppers blanketing the meat. Meanwhile we sipped a fruity 2003 Cos Labory from Saint-Estephe.

We finished the wine, everyone going back to their favorite of the night, with some cheese. The latter was another first for me: Monte Enebro,  a Spanish semi-firm goat with an herbed rind.

Yes, it was indeed one of those meals where you felt you were atop the “foodie” chain.

Under the multi-media scheme, she and fellow British celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal, creator of the three-Michelin starred Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, encourage people to cook at home mainly through TV ads, Internet streaming videos, and printed recipe cards that instruct people how to make them using ingredients found within the Waitrose aisles.

Summer pudding, a simple mixture of white bread, berries and a bit of sugar

I picked up two of Delia’s recipes recently and pushed my trolley through the Waitrose in Eaton Village and picked up everything I needed to produce Half-time Saltimbocca Pork with Parma ham, sage and Marsala as a main course and English Summer Pudding as a dessert when our American friends were in town.

Both dishes were remarkably easy to assemble, a feature I am rapidly discovering is a Delia hallmark.

The “half-time” in the pork recipe’s title refers any cook’s ability to whip it up during the break between football halves and eat it atop dressed greens while watching the second 45 minutes of the match.

Pork saltimbocca with an overly sweet marsala wine sauce

The summer pudding involves lining a bowl with crust-less white bread and filling it with berries (black and red raspberries, red and black currants, strawberries and blueberries) warmed with some sugar so that their juices flow bright red and infect the bread with their crimson as it sets overnight in the fridge.

One of these dishes was fabulously balanced between sugary and sour, soft and subtle.  But the other was far too sweet for my taste, and unfortunately, I’m not talking about the pudding. 

The pork medallions with sage and Parma ham was a fine combination – much like veal or chicken would be in any Italian saltimbocco preparation.  Delia has you make the accompanying sauce from just sweet Marsala and butter, as it is one standard preparation of Saltimbocca alla Romana.  So I guess I cannot wholly fault Delia for the overly sweet sauce to this otherwise salty dish. 

But for my taste, I think the next time I need a quick half-time meal, I’ll dilute the marsala with some broth, enrich it with some demi-glace or maybe tart it up a bit with some dry white wine or lemon juice.

But my English friends, Danny and Sue, are very supportive of me in my efforts to embrace the best of British home cooking.  Last night, they tossed aside their fears (although they did mention them as we sipped our second glasses of sherry before dinner), invited us to dinner, and did not just one, not just two, but three full on Delias in my honor.  

As they slaved over my dinner, they trotted out their entire collection of Delia cookbooks for me to peruse.  I have most of them, but will definitely be searching through the second-hand book shops here for a copy of her 1985 edition of Frugal Food, in the forward to that cookbook she warns that British eaters were getting too fat and that home cookery would help save both themselves from larger trouser sizes and heart troubles and the planet from reckless consumption.

Piedmont Roasted Peppers

The starter was Piedmont Roasted Peppers, a recipe first published in Delia Smith Summer Collection in 1993. Delia traces the credit for this dish from the London restaurant where she first ate it to a Welsh place where the London chef first ate it.

This is one of those dishes where you want to throw all manners aside, grab a piece of bread and use it to sop up the drippings in the roasting pan.  You slice red and yellow peppers in half, removing the seeds but keeping the halved stems intact for dramatic effect.  Then you stuff the peppers with skinned, raw tomatoes, garlic slivers, anchovy pieces and a grinding of fresh black pepper.  Amply drizzle the lot with olive oil and roast the stuffed peppers until they are slightly charred and fabulously running over with sweet juices.  You serve them topped with sprigs fresh basil.

After eating these – well, what I had of them as Eliza ate her two and one of mine – I’d have to say that Danny and Sue had nothing to fear but my full on approval and expectation that they serve these every time we come to visit.

Sherry, chicken and tarragon ... sweet.

The main course was Chicken with Sherry Vinegar and Tarragon Sauce, Delia’s adaptation of the French classic called poulet au vinaigre, which was first published in 1982 in Delia’s Complete Cookery Course. This dish requires a whole broken down chicken, the pieces of which are first browned in a small amount of hot oil and then simmered – uncovered – with loads of medium sherry, sherry vinegar, tarragon, and whole shallots and garlic cloves.  The sauce is finished by stirring in some crème fraiche.   There I go again, embarrassing myself by dipping my bread into the serving dish….

For dessert there was Baked Apple and Almond Pudding – which Delia credits the chef at an old pub in Laycock (in Wiltshire, not far from Bath) called the Sign of the Angel, and was published in 2006 as part of The Delia Collection, Puddings. This is a warm, creamy nutty, cake sitting atop homemade applesauce.  Pouring some cold, single cream over the top just seals the deal.

So Danny and Sue, with this extreme success under your belt, what are you cooking for me next week?

A very good scone in the garden

This morning, I had the first English scone of this particular trip to the UK.  It wasn’t one of Delia’s, I am afraid.  It was pulled from a friend’s freezer, put in a recycled butter container with about six of its siblings, and brought to my place by said friend when she popped round for a cup of tea and a long overdue chat.

Turns out, my friend didn’t make the scones either.  She regifted them to me, admitting that fact just as I inquired whether or not she’d used cream in the recipe. Given the confession, she couldn’t answer my query with any authority. But if I were making an educated guess, I’d have to say they did have some sort of extra fat in the mix, because, in spite of the time spent frozen, they were just the right combination of crumbly and moist, a perfect carrier for a bit of butter and strawberry conserves.

I turned to Delia for some insight into which ingredients provide your best chance for a moist scone once you pull it out of the freezer.  It turns out that your most secure bet is a mixture of three fats, whether they are butter, full fat milk, buttermilk, cream, Greek yogurt or cheese.  All of the scone recipes in Delia’s cooking volumes I had on hand and on her Web site call for that three-way combination, whether she is instructing on a savory or a sweet variety.

Delia advises that all scones are best eaten on the day they are made.  But she also concedes that any left on the plate will freeze perfectly well.

Andy's preferred custard

My husband is all about loyalty.  He truly believes (even sometimes as late as the last week in September) that the Red Sox will still be playing in October. He still avoids Florida because of the 2000 election results. And he’s not convinced the traditional English custard recipe I pulled from the voluminous Delia’s Complete How to Cook (Random House, 2009) pages is any better than the dessert sauce made from Bird’s Custard Powder that he grew up on.

Bird’s is an off-white, egg-less dust with an ingredient list comprising corn flour, salt, colour, annatto (a natural red/yellow dye) and flavouring.  You mix it with a bit of sugar and a lot of milk to get a thick, off-yellow cream that lifts up even the modest British pudding on offer.  Bird’s – by its own marketing admission – is “the original custard brand, established in 1937 and loved by generations ever since.” (That a commercial brand, of course, since custard — sans the vanilla flavoring– can be traced back to the Romans’ sweets tables.)

Banana bread pudding with traditional English custard

Delia’s recipe yields a smooth, bespeckled, pale cream that starts with six egg yolks, two ounces of golden caster sugar, a spoonful of corn flour, and a pint of double cream that’s had steeping in it a vanilla bean — seeds scraped free and floating.  Delia has you bring the vanilla cream to just beneath simmering and then slowly stream it into the eggs that have been beaten with the sugar and flour.  You return the mixture to very low heat and keep stirring until it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon. (You can find the full recipe on Delia’s site.)

Andy is also very loyal to me, so he didn’t protest the homemade custard, at least not in front of our guests – one of them, an very animated 10-year-old, fresh from a three-week stay with relatives in France where his excitement for food was genetically reinforced, actually yodeled (he had a week in the Alps, too) when he tasted it. My husband, in fact, had several helpings of it poured over the banana bread pudding I made as the custard carrier. But he did pledge his undying allegiance to Bird’s.

While I like the Sox and understand the Democratic aversion to Florida, I disagree with him on this matter.  I can pass on the Bird’s in most instances.  But I’m sitting here snacking on a bowl of Delia’s custard (sans any type of pudding under it) as I write in the wee hours of the morning.

 Banana Bread Pudding

The British’s definition of “mean” varies greatly from the American one.  Over here the word means “thrifty”. In that spirit (and since I’d just spend five quid on the vanilla bean I needed to make the custard), I looked to see what I had in the pantry to fit the underlying pudding bill. From the day old bread, very ripe bananas and an abundance of milk and eggs, I came up with this recipe.  

Ingredients

Butter

7-8 cups of hearty day old bread, torn in bite sized pieces

3 ripe bananas, sliced

½ cup sugar, divided

4 eggs, beaten

3 cups of milk

Cinnamon

Ground cloves

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Use the butter to coat the bottom and all sides of a 13-by-9 glass or earthenware dish.

In a large bowl, mix bread, ¼ cup of sugar, bananas, eggs, milk, 1 teaspoon cinnamon and ½ teaspoon cloves and stir completely.  Pour mixture into prepared dish.

Mix ½ teaspoon of cinnamon with ¼ cup of sugar.  Sprinkle cinnamon sugar evenly over the pudding.

Place dish inside a large, rectangle roasting pan.  Fill the roasting pan with water so that the water level goes about ¾ of the way up the sides of the pudding dish.  Cook in the water bath for about 50-60 minutes until the top is nicely browned and the middle is set.

You can serve this warm or at room temperature.  I suggest Delia’s custard as a perfect sauce, but Andy is sticking to his Bird’s. (To help buy your vote, I’m sure he would be happy to bring some back for you if you can’t get it at your local grocery.)

Spanish chorizo

In my favorite grocery in Norwich, there are 13 varieties of Spanish chorizo (a flavorful, course ground pork sausage traditionally produced on the Iberian Penninsula). Clearly the English have adopted this lovely reddish-orange link as a staple seeing as they need to have it at the ready in hot, whole, smoked, raw, sweet and sliced formats.  I’m just pleased to have it at all. 

At home I can easily get my hands on the Mexican variety, but that variation is almost always raw and it is flavored and colored with more affordable chili peppers, not with the traditional pimenton (smoked paprika), which is the source of Spanish chorizo’s signature color and flavor.

Today, Delia and I paired up her penchant for eggs with my own for Spanish chorizo in a dish that is, work-wise, very doable for breakfast but has a heartiness about it that would serve you and your guests well for either a lunch or dinner main course.  It’s Spanish chorizo hash with fresh fried eggs.

A fried egg atop chorizo hash

Delia’s instructions are to medium dice a couple of potatoes and set them to steam in a pot until they are fork tender.  While that is happening, you mince a fat garlic clove and chop a small onion, a bell pepper and a sizable chunk of Chorizo in similar sized pieces. You then sweat the garlic, onions and peppers in a hot pan with a bit of olive oil and then push them aside in the pan and heat up the chunks of chorizo.  From there you add the potatoes (which have been drained by this point), a rounded teaspoon of hot paprika, and salt and pepper and mix thoroughly.  Keep the hash over low heat while you fry as many eggs as you need.  Serve the hash on a place with a hot, fried eggs and plenty of break to help sop up the lovely yolk as it picks up a reddish tinge from the paprika.

It’s a sweet, spicy, salty, satisfying bite.

Friends from the UK wanted to understand what life is like in middle-America is all about.  On Tuesday they moved into our house in Carlisle, and yesterday, we landed in their home here in Norwich, in Norfolk, England.

The house swap will last a month.  And while that helps me put off some aspects of the transition (namely taking up my externship position in the kitchen of Trattoria Piatto in Carlisle), I cannot sit professionally idle for an entire month (I suppose I could try, but that runs counter to my Type A personality, I think).

So I plan to use this time to get to know Delia Smith a little bit better than I currently do, which is indeed a short-coming in my culinary experience, especially if I want to write articles and develop recipes targeted toward the home cook.

Delia is a self-taught British cookery mainstay — a cross between Julia Child and Martha Stewart, if you need an American point of reference – who is positively manic about precisely developing and testing her recipes before publishing them. Delia is ubiquitous in British kitchens.  She has spent the whole of her 40-year career teaching average English people how to cook everything via her newspaper articles, BBC cookery television shows, dozens of cookery books and, most recently, her web site, www.deliaonline.com.

Delia’s reportedly worth well over 20 million pounds (although she repeatedly denies being rich) and holds, with her husband, a majority share of a professional football team (Norwich City Football Club).  There is a common phrase used among my British friends: “Doing a Delia”, which means they are serving a dish resulting from one of her fool-proof recipes.  And many times they can quote you the page number from which they’ve pulled it.

There is also the matter of “Delia Cheat” products, ingredients that Delia has deemed to be of very high quality and help cut down on the time to prepare the recipes that include them.  Makers of these product proudly where a “Delia Cheat” logo and enjoy increased sales, which leads us to the next Delia phenomenon.  It’s called the “Delia Effect” which means almost immediately after she sings the praises of a raw ingredient, a prepared product or a kitchen utensil, sales simply soar.  Within days of her BBC Christmas special airing last December sales of ingredients used on the show like soft prunes, tinned chestnuts and Fair Trade cinnamon increased by 106, 71 and 59 percent, respectively.

The mighty egg

One of the rudimentary premises of Delia’s work is that everyone can cook, and her seminal “How to Cook” series first published in 1999 and 2000 and updated in a 700-page bound volume last year, starts with the humble but mighty egg. She gives tidbits about storing and measuring the age of the egg like those I’ve seen in other cookbooks.  But she also advises on how variously-aged eggs are best suited for certain culinary usages.   If you’re going to poach it or fry it, it’s best to catch it from the hen. If you have to separate the eggs for use, say, in either custard or meringue, they need to be less than a week old.  For hard-boiled, scrambled or an omelet a two-week old egg is fine.  When making baked dishes like quiche or using eggs in baked goods recipes, eggs as old as three weeks will suit, but Delia feels that no one should keep eggs longer than that.

My procrastinating passage of time with Delia’s recipes begins with the egg. I am homing in two of my favorite things: British egg mayonnaise sandwiches and anything having to do with Spanish chorizo.  And one more favorite by proxy: traditional English custard because Andy will simply eat anything covered in it.

I hardly ever eat egg salad sandwiches at home and never buy them out in the US because they have so much mayonnaise in them. But here in the UK, I do because they are simply that good.  In fact, I grabbed one at the Marks and Spencer’s in the Manchester train station yesterday as my first meal in England.

Spring onion, chive and egg mayonnaise sandwiches

Delia’s take on the egg mayonnaise is open faced comprising three hardboiled eggs cooked no longer than seven minutes, a hefty tablespoon of chives, four finely chopped spring onions, greens and all, only a tablespoon of mayonnaise (this small amount is what draws me to this recipe) and a small bit of softened butter sitting on half a freshly baked roll.  The combination is one that starts with a crunchy onion flavor, followed by a soothing creaminess. It’s a great comfort food when you’re a peckish on a Sunday evening, but know you shouldn’t indulge too heavily because you also know what you ate at the pub lunch earlier in the day.

Tomorrow’s breakfast: chorizo hash with fried eggs.

Volcanic cloud covering my next summit

I was nonplussed by the last day of my formal culinary school adventure. There was no ticker-tape parade in my honor. No fireworks. No three-tiered graduation cake. Heck, having to produce said cake as a practical application of my new skills would have rendered more excitement.

There was really only the matter of me passing my ServSafe Alcohol certification test: 80 multiple-choice questions – 18 of which I could get wrong and still pass. The main requirement for success was knowing how to count drinks and assess if the drinkers were drunk. I’d practiced those skills the night before, sitting at a Belgian beer bar in Shadyside with Andy, who’d flown into town to help me move home. Three minutes after I filled in the last bubble with my No. 2 pencil, Andy picked me up on the corner of Sixth and Liberty. Driving east on the expressway, I watched the Pittsburgh skyline disappear in the rear view mirror as I stripped off my chef’s jacket for a more comfortable ride back to my real life.

I’d originally thought that particular ride would serve as the setting for the final posting to this blog which had as its hook the ups and downs of being 42 and in culinary school. But when I mentioned that termination plan to one of my oldest friends, she indignantly said “You can’t stop blogging. You’re not remade yet. I want to read about you hitting your goal.”

“Which is what exactly?” I said partly to her, but mostly out loud to myself.

As my psychologist friend tells me every time I hit a life crisis, I really stink at transitions. But my mother describes me as a person always looking for the next mountain to climb. Reconciling those two people in my head as I wrap up my six-month stint in culinary Candy Land has got me in a bit of a she-said/she-said kind of a tailspin.

This transition is a total whopper. And I think the next mountain top seems to be clouded with volcanic ash.

Some days I want to crawl into the unfinished side of my basement and simplyorganize the boxes that have yet to be unpacked from last year’s trans-Atlantic move or finally clean out the washing machine detergent receptacles that have gotten crusty. “I don’t need an interesting career. I can clean my house and be perfectly happy.” Those are the thoughts running through my head on those days.

But on the other days — when I am sitting across the kitchen table from a local micro-farmer who is explaining with such gusto what goes into growing the perfect Central PA tomato, or when I am working with lady who raises and sells goat meat to develop a recipe with serious curb appeal — that I realize I am happier now with the subject matter about which I write, and need to pursue food writing with all I’ve got.

Then there are the in-between days. On these days, I’ll do crazy things like invite only slightly controlled chaos into my kitchen by hosting cooking enthusiasts I met on-line (and have subsequently come to bond with) into my kitchen for a communal canning — 28 quarts of sour cherries! a half bushel of apricots! — so I might possibly catch the eye of the editors of one of the hottest food-related sites out there in the social media market. Or as I bat story ideas around my head, deeming them either too stupid or too parochial to pitch, only to find them featured in the latest issue of the newspapers, magazines and web sites I dream about contributing to. On these days, I contemplate calling my old boss and begging for tech writing work that would be much easier to get because I am a known quantity in that realm.

Yes, I know that would be defeating the whole purpose of this “remaking Christine” exercise. Onward and upward is the only way I can travel now. I take heart in the fact that even as the Icelandic cloud cover cleared, so shall the path to my next summit.

The miracle lemon souffles, they rise even early in the morning

Last Friday I had lemon soufflé with Chambord crème Anglaise for breakfast.  And I make no apologies. Not even to my sister-in-law to whom I’ve pledged undying Weight Watchers solidarity so that we might don bathing suits without embarrassment by Labor Day.  Yes, it was so good there was no guilt involved.

I’d switched my normally scheduled kitchens class from the 1 to 4 PM slot to the 6:30 to 9:30 AM one so that I could make Massachusetts by nightfall, where my kids had spent the previous week with my parents while I made desserts in Pittsburgh and Andy dug around in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. en route to his next book.  I was only halfway through my first cup of tea when Chef told us to take the basic sweet soufflé recipe and turn it into any combination we could dream up. I even surprised myself when I suggested to my partner Jack that we go for the lemon/raspberry combination.  Jack didn’t argue, he was even sleepier than I.

I’d only done one other soufflé in my life.  A cheese and artichoke one I tested for www.Food52.com, a food-related social networking site with which I have recently become obsessed. So I was a bit concerned to be dealing with a new formula, a new cooking technique, and a flavor profile concocted while I was still half asleep.

The formula was a basic one.  Equal parts flour and butter worked into a paste (classically called a beurre manie) which will eventually be used as a thickener for the base of the soufflé batter.  Bring to a boil a mixture of four parts milk to one part sugar and off heat vigorously whisk in pieces of the beurre manie ball until all is smooth.  The pot goes back on the heat until it gets so thick, that it seems too far, maybe because the whisk could stand straight in the paste without assistance.  Work in egg yolks and the zest of a couple of lemons and fold in the egg whites that have been whipped to soft peaks and sweetened.

Ramekins had been lined with butter and dusted with granulated sugar and we scooped in the batter which, unfortunately,  looked relatively flat to me. I was not hopeful we were going to get lovely, lofty and light soufflés on this go around.  It was still just too early in the barely caffeinated day to be optimistic.

 We did not realize until it was too late that we should have been making the crème anglaise in tandem with the soufflés in order to get it heated enough to make the eggs safe and the consistency right and cooled again to make the sauce a cold contrast to the warm main event.  Jack scalds the milk while I whisk the eggs.  We combine the two in a slow, steady stream so as not to get scrambled eggs (even if that was the more appropriate dish for an 8 a.m. tasting!)  The mixture gets a hot water bath to get to 185 degrees, a shot of Chambord, raspberry liquor, for flavor, and an ice bath to cool it quickly.  In between these steps I sneak a peak in the deck oven and am pleasantly shocked that the soufflés are a full inch over the tops of their ramekins. 

The Chambord flavored Creme Anglaise is tucked inside the souffle.

Our only dilemma left at this juncture is uniting the two elements. Chef explains that if we carefully put a small hole in the top of the soufflé, we can spoon some of the raspberry custard into its center, giving the eater the best of both in each bite.  That eater would be me. And I must confess it forward that I’d do it all over again if ever given the opportunity.