Private Business Dinner Experience
Good evening.
In this article I want to tell you about my dinner experience.
Since I have been working for my current employer, me and my co-workers could join business dinners at fancy restaurants here in Guernsey. These dinners are organized when the London co-workers come to visit our office here in Guernsey.
When this happens we use to book a table for 10 at Red, one of the best Guernsey restaurants.
Yesterday I was invited as well and 9 of us enjoyed a free dinner at Red's private table. We went there at 19:00 and finished around 23:00.
We started with drinks, I have ordered a simple beer, but my co-workers ordered cocktails, such as the bootylicious. One of us advised the wine and we ended up ordering 2 bottles of red and 2 bottles of white.
One of us arrived late because he could not find the restaurant and as soon as he arrived we got one amuse bouche from the chef.
Red is a steakhouse and we could choose day specialties from their blackboard.
Me and C decided to share a 800 grams cote de boeuf (they have a French chef that used to work in a starred restaurant).
The private room was in the basement and we were surrounded by bottles of wine from all over the world.
This is not the first time I join these business dinners but the first time I have been into the private table.
While waiting for the main plate we got 2 platters with mixed appetisers
Each platter contained:
Tempura, pork belly, salami, a steak skewer And a mini ball that taste like arancini.
One of us also ordered Charleston chicken as that is one of his favourite plates here.
Before coming to this dinner I prepared carbonara for @flapiz , as I could not invite her, so I thought it would be nice to prepare her dinner. While we were waiting for steak, I was still messaging her then she got a bit busy and silent.
The dinner continued with jokes from USA, Japanese culture information exchanges, mates telling about their ex-wives and bad experiences in Naples, Italy.
I remember one joke: we were talking about durian bad smell and one of us said that, "durian smell bad, but taste amazing.. so it is like 69 position".
Here a picture of my steak (medium rare)
At this point i was a bit tipsy and stopped taking pictures, but we had a lot of side dishes: mac and cheese with truffle oil, with bacon, peas, chips, onion rings, spinach.
It was really hard to finish all this food, but we did a good job.
My USA co-worker told us about his very religious science education. Our London guest and one of us also both have a Japanese wife and they told us about Japanese working culture and how do they tend to interact with foreigners. C spent 12 years in Japan and then moved back to Guernsey, while J always lived in London, but his wife is from Japan.
We had more wine, some of us ordered ice wine, but I wanted to have dessert, so I got a creme brulee with chocolate instead.
J wanted to try one of the typical Guernsey cocktail ( crack baby ) this is usually a shot so he tried to ask for a long crack baby drink. The waiter came back with a huge crack baby and he called it : "crack daddy" it was really huge. Usually a crack baby contains vodka, champagne, passion fruit. This crack daddy was a cocktail size. We had one last drink then we asked for the bill. Our London guest paid, but the company will refund him.
At this point I went back home, @flapiz was waiting for me, but unfortunately she was in a bad mood, luckily I was able to comfort her. :)
That's all. Ciao for now.
Pork Medallion steak half Filipino style 🏅
Good morning everyone. Last night I had an amazing steak, can you believe it?
@flapiz massaged it very well.
I like to eat pork adobo and we did not have fish. We are in the UK so we decided to eat pork and chips. My only task was to chop the chips, but I can proudly say I did not lose any finger. We decided to marinate the pork with soy sauce for a full day. In case you do not want to marinate you can just cook the medallions as they are from the store.
Ingredients:
2 potatoes
Garlic
Oil
Silver Swan Soy sauce
salt
2 Medallion pork
Butter
Thyme
Pepper
Tomatoes
Cooking procedure:
Slice the garlic, cut the sides and press it to remove the skin.
Take the 2 pork medallion, pour (silver swan filipino) soy sauce, oil, salt , pepper, powder garlic and massage them for few minutes. The massage will make the pork happier and more flavoured. Put the medallion pork in the fridge for 24 hours so they can marinate and absorb fully the heavenly ingredients.
The day after that I had to cut potatoes into little cubes. I peeled only one potato.
Then i have added thyme, butter and oil to them. Some are peeled and some not, because I have started peeling them and then realized I wanted the skin too.
Massage the potatoes and mix all the ingredients. Just because we massaged the pork medallions amd the potato could become a bit jealous otherwise.
When the oven is fully warmed you can insert the potato mix inside it and leave them for 25 minutes.
Take the marinated pork medallion and put them on a pan fry, add oil, pepper and butter.
Butter should stay on the top, so you can enjoy seeing it melt during the cooking process. You can also add butter under the pork and let it melt instead of the oil.
When the pork is almost cooked you can add tomatoes, these will burn a bit and become crispy. Do not forget to turn the pork.
12 minutes should be enough to cook the medallions more than enough.
At this point you can serve, unless you want to eat directly from the pan fry (if you are starving and can't wait for the food no more)
Are you ready for some food porn?
Hope you like the pictures :))) photos are taken with a professional camera and manual focus.
I loved the soy sauce coating and flavour, was worth to wait for 24 hours. Roasted chips are also one of my favourite dishes.
Before eating this we had roasted chips at a friend's house as well, it was not enough.
This was the only course for tonight and that's all folks! hope you did not drool too much this time, go get some napkins :D
See you in the next article
Ciao Ciao
My Carbonara
Hi, my name is Andrea. I am from Italy, but I live in Guernsey (UK). I am not a chef, but due to distance from home, nonna and mamma, I had to learn how to cook. For 2 years, I ate ready meal carbonara from stores in here, I was disappointed and tired, so I have learned how to do my own. In this article I will show you how I do it, in details, step by step and common mistakes.
Photos are taken with a professional camera , @flapiz helped me.
Ingredients for 2 servings:
77 gr pancetta or guanciale
Parmigiano cheese
Pecorino cheese
2 eggs yolks
Water
Salt
Extra virgin oil
Spaghetti
Let 's start with putting pancetta on a pan fry! In the uk it is hard to find guanciale, but pancetta can be used as well. Guanciale is softer and fattier than pancetta, but
pancetta can be crispier.
You can cook guanciale until it turns almost gold, while pancetta can stay over the fire for a bit longer. If you cook guanciale the fat will remain on the pan fry and you can remove it after cooking, you can do the same with pancetta. Do not add oil on the pan fry before you start cooking.
At the same time you can start adding water inside a pot and put it over a fire with some salt, we will need to wait until it boils.
While we wait for the water to boil, we can prepare the "carbocream". I use a mug for this step. Get 2 eggs yolk (mainly yolk) and put them into a mug
Then add a little bit of grated Pecorino, Parmigiano cheese and mix them.
As you can see in the picture above, we do not need to add a lot of cheese at this point. Make sure that the mix is liquid but dense. It should not be hard to mix, you can even use a fork.
At this point the water must be boiling and you can add spaghetti to it. Do not break spaghetti and make sure they do not touch the hottest part of the pot (walls). We do not want to burn them. They will bend in few seconds thanks to the hot temperature.
The normal spaghetti cooking time is 11 minutes, but in this case I have cooked them only for 8 minutes and 30 seconds. This because I will add them into a hot pan fry with the other ingredients for few minutes; In this way they will have time to mix and cook until a perfect result.
Pancetta can cook while spaghetti are swimming happily in hot water. When they are ready you can remove the fat oil. Keep stirring spaghetti so they do not get too close to each other (they tend to hug each other too much otherwise)
Let's remove water and add pasta to the pan fry where we cooked the diced pancetta, we can do this and add some extra virgin olive oil to it.
At this point we are also ready to add the "carbocream".
Our carbonara is almost ready, we only need to mix everything and add tomatoes and a little bit of cheese to our plates.
It is time to put our final result into our plates!! Thanks for following me until now.
Let's add tomatoes and a final touch of Pecorino to it.
The total preparation time is around 15 minutes, we both enjoyed our meal tonight. It is not expensive to cook this at home and you can get great results as well.
Let me know if you want to try this and if you like this kind of article.
Do you cook carbonara in different ways?
I am looking forward to hearing from you all soon.
Ciao for now.
@Andrea1511
