Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Stacey Ballis

Quote by Stacey Ballis

“Kai and I head back into the kitchen, where the platters and trays are set up. Grilled vegetable skewers with a lemon dressing. Beef tenderloin, roasted medium rare, sliced thin, with a grainy mustard sauce. Orzo salad with spinach, red onion, and feta. Filled cucumbers and pickled carrots. White beans with sage. Saffron risotto with artichokes and chicken. Mini pavlovas and poached pears and poppy-seed cookies.”

Quote by Stacey Ballis

Book:Good Enough to Eat
Create image

Work

Good Enough to Eat

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Stacey Ballis

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Stacey Ballis. more

You May Also Like

“Kai enlisted the help of some culinary students for prep work and serving, and pulled out all the stops for this party, skipping the sit-down dinner in favor of endless little nibbles, sort of like tapas or a wonderful tasting menu. Champagne laced with Pineau des Charentes, a light cognac with hints of apple that essentially puts a velvet smoking jacket around the dry sparkling wine. Perfect scallops, crispy on the outside, succulent and sweet within, with a vanilla aioli. Tiny two-bite Kobe sliders on little pretzel rolls with caramelized onions, horseradish cream, and melted fontina. Seared tuna in a spicy soy glaze, ingenious one-bite caprese salads made by hollowing out cherry tomatoes, dropping some olive oil and balsamic vinegar inside, and stuffing with a mozzarella ball wrapped in fresh basil. Espresso cups of chunky roasted tomato soup with grilled cheese croutons. The food is delicious and never-ending, supplemented with little bowls of nuts, olives, raw veggies, and homemade potato chips with lemon and rosemary.”

Food And WineAppetizersNibble
Book:Good Enough to Eat
Create image

“We had fish fritters to start, juicy and thick, about the size of your hand. We began by cutting them into tiny chunks, administering peanut sauce with the tips of our knives, but soon we just held them between our paws like burgers and dunked. The room smelled of citrus and salt, filled with the wet smack of our mastication. I looked around the room, delighted to see so many women ferociously eating fish. We followed with bouillabaisse. When first suggested, it generated a ripple of controversy. It is not the sort of dish that we would normally want to endorse: a nonfood, lacking the heft and substance we usually favor. Soup seemed the kind of joyless meal women feel they should serve, rather than doing so out of any sense of appetite or desire. In the end the bouillabaisse was served with the fish on the side (as is tradition) and with a little pouring jug of double cream (which is not).”

SoupSeafoodAppetizersBouillabaisse
Book:Supper Club
Create image

“The sun was a juicy pink as it sank toward the water. Rex played "As Time Goes By." The foie gras was good enough to shift Adrienne's mood from despondent to merely poor. It was deliciously fatty, a heavenly richness balanced by the sweet roasted figs. Who wanted to be married and have children when she could be eating foie gras like this with a front-row seat for the sunset? Adrienne forgot her manners. She devoured her appetizer in five lusty bites, and then she helped herself to more caviar. She was starving.”

PianoSunsetAppetizersFoie GrasGourmet Food Items
Book:The Blue Bistro
Create image

“For four hours, Andrew and I were presented with course after course of delightful creations, imaginative pairings, and, always, dramatic presentations. Little fillets of sturgeon arrived under a glass dome, after which it was lifted, applewood smoke billowed out across the table. Pretzel bread, cheese, and ale, meant to evoke a picnic in Central Park, was delivered in a picnic basket. But my favorite dish was the carrot tartare. The idea came, along with many of the menu's other courses, while researching reflecting upon New York's classic restaurants. From 21 Club to Four Seasons, once upon a time, every establishment offered a signature steak tartare. "What's our tartare?" Will and Daniel wondered. They kept playing with formulas and recipes and coming close to something special, but it never quite had the wow factor they were looking for. One day after Daniel returned from Paffenroth Gardens, a farm in the Hudson Valley with the rich muck soil that yields incredibly flavorful root vegetables, they had a moment. In his perfect Swiss accent, he said, "What if we used carrots?" Will remembers. And so carrot tartare, a sublime ode to the humble vegetable, was added to the Eleven Madison Park tasting course. "I love that moment when you clamp a meat grinder onto the table and people expect it to be meat, and it's not," Will gushes of the theatrical table side presentation. After the vibrant carrots are ground by the server, they're turned over to you along with a palette of ingredients with which to mix and play: pickled mustard seeds, quail egg yolk, pea mustard, smoked bluefish, spicy vinaigrette. It was one of the most enlightening yet simple dishes I've ever had. I didn't know exactly which combination of ingredients I mixed, adding a little of this and a little of that, but every bite I created was fresh, bright, and ringing with flavor. Carrots- who knew?”

ManhattanCarrotsAppetizersPotluck
Book:Brooklyn in Love: A Delicious Memoir of Food, Family, and Finding Yourself
Create image

“She looked up to see a knob of canary-yellow butter being carried towards her in a glass-lidded container. 'All this butter just for me, when there's a national shortage...' Hearing Rika mumbling these words, the maitre d' smiled and lifted the lid of the dish. 'This butter had been flown in especially from overseas. Pleas help yourself to as much as you'd like.' Confronted with an overwhelming selection of different kinds of bread on the trolley, Rika chose the simplest option she could see--- a piece of baguette. Once again, she thought that she should have come with Reiko. Reiko would have told her which to choose. Rika spread a thick layer of butter on the bread. The butter, of a firmness that would break apart slowly on the tongue, went sinking into the crumb of the baguette. That alone was enough to make Rika glad she'd come. The next course to be served was a chilled dish of avocado and snow crab stacked delicately like layer cake, topped with a generous helping of caviar. The acidity of the pomegranate seeds that exploded juicily in her mouth accentuated the creamy richness of the avocado and the sweetness of the crab flesh. Their unabashed scarlet hue brought the color palette of the whole plate to life. Chased by the champagne, the taste of the crab and the caviar expanded like light suffusing her mouth.”

SeafoodFusionBread And ButterAppetizersBook Title
Book:Butter
Create image

“We ate three tiny, geometrically engineered appetizers, including a perfect cube of kabocha squash-flavored fish cake and an octopus "salad" consisting of one tiny piece of octopus brushed with a plum dressing. Then the waitress uncovered and lit the burner in the center of the table and set a shallow cast-iron pan on top. She poured a thin layer of sauce from a pitcher. Sukiyaki is all about the sauce, a mixture of soy sauce, mirin, sake, and sugar. It's frankly sweet. Usually I'm a tiresome person who complains about overly sweet food, but where soy sauce is involved, I make an exception, because soy sauce and sugar were born to hang. The waitress set down a platter of thin-sliced Wagyu beef, so marbled that it was nearly white. She asked if we wanted egg. This time I was prepared: only for me, thanks. Then she cooked us each a slice of beef. It was tender enough to cut with your tongue against the roof of your mouth. While we sighed over the meat, she began adding other ingredients to the pan: napa cabbage, tofu, wheat gluten (fu), fresh shiitake mushrooms, shirataki noodles, chrysanthemum leaves (shungiku), and, of course, negi. Suggested tourist slogan: Tokyo: We put negi in it. Then we were left to cook the rest of the meat and vegetables ourselves. I think we nailed it. (Actually, it's impossible to do it wrong.) Like chanko nabe and all Japanese hot pots, sukiyaki gets better as the meal goes on, because the sauce becomes more concentrated and soaks up more flavor from the ingredients cooking in it.”

IngredientsAppetizersSaucesSoy SauceFather Daughter BondSukiyaki
Book:Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo
Create image

“With the first glass of wine, the stilted silence prevails. A plate of warm buffalo mozzarella appears, speckled with pink peppercorns, and something about that combination of tang and spice, cream and crunch, tells you that tonight will be different from the others you've spent in Japan. With the second glass of wine, your neighbors look over and offer a kanpai. Another plate arrives, this one a few pieces of seared octopus, the purple tentacles curled like crawling vines around a warm mound of barely mashed potatoes.”

AppetizersJapanese CuisineOsaka
Book:Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture
Create image

“Merriem carries the enormous saucepan, a cloud of steam rising from it, into the dining room. "Spring risotto," she calls it. It's got snipped garlic scapes, tons of parsley, and just-wilted pea greens piled on top. Summer carries a big glazed terra-cotta saucer full of tiny new potatoes with butter and freshly torn mint, and I bring the asparagus, which Merriem calls "speary-grass," served with simple seasoning.”

SpringVegetablesAppetizersAsparagusRisotto
Book:Season of Salt and Honey
Create image

“Renzo from Roddino leaves us on the doorstep of Osteria da Gemma, a Langhe culinary landmark in a village scarcely large enough to fill the restaurant. Before we can shake off the wet and the cold, before we can see a menu or catch our breath, the waiter comes by and drops a cutting board full of salumi between us. Prego. Then another plate comes out- carne cruda, a soft mound of hand-chopped veal dressed with nothing but olive oil and a bit of lemon, a classic warm-up to a Piedmont meal. The plates continue, and it soon becomes very clear that we have no say in the matter. Insalata russa, a tricolore of toothsome green peas, orange carrots, and ivory potatoes, bound in a cloak of mayonnaise and crumbled egg yolk. Vitello tonnato, Piedmont's famous take on surf and turf: thin slices of roast beef with a thick emulsion of mayo and tuna. Each bite brings us slowly out of the mist of emotion and into the din of the dining room.”

AppetizersSurf And TurfItalian CuisineWelcomingLanghePiedmontOsteria
Book:Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture
Create image