So first off, I’ve learned my lesson, at least until next week, about sassing a recipe as being easy or cliche. The kitchen gods are listening, and they mislike hubris.
I used frozen puff pastry for the baked brie, but mindful of the occasional experience where I took puff pastry out too late and found it difficult to work with, I took it out early. Very early. This turned out to be a mistake.
The kitchen was very warm today and the puff pastry basically turned into liquid, stuck to the paper inside the product box. So I had to scrape it out into a giant soft glob, cool it a bit, and reroll it out. It still worked but it wasn’t quite as elegant as if I had been working with a firmly set puff pastry sheet.
Tasted good, too. Though I wasn’t in doubt on that really. The apple and caramelized onion worked very well on top of the brie.
The pork also was decent enough—one eater who didn’t like mushrooms normally liked the sauce.
I don’t think you can go too wrong with pork tenderloin unless you completely hammer it, but sure, this was a fine preparation.
The potato salad and the crab salad were, as I kind of felt they might be, boring as hell.
I roasted the potatoes rather than boiled them to give them a better mouthfeel, but I was desperately contemplating something to give the buttermilk-mint dressing more tang or punch or something. I didn’t do it but I wish I had. You couldn’t take it on a picnic (Bishop says as much) because the buttermilk’s got to stay cool. I should have done something to jazz it up a bit or make it smoother or something.
The crab salad surprised me at how bleah it was. The grapefruit-avocado combination should be a winner but the basic vinaigrette dressing just did not help at all and the crab didn’t do anything interesting for the salad beyond that. Bishop means for the crab to be served in smaller increments over multiple smaller servings, so maybe putting it one bowl was a mistake, but I just don’t think there was anything interesting in there to save. I suppose one could say “that’s what happens when you substitute blue crab for Dungeness” but I am not having that. The basic components of that salad should be delicious together, but there’s something that needs rethinking. Maybe the greens were the problem.
One little thing that occurred to me re-reading is that dishes that I’d have garlic in didn’t have garlic. There’s garlic, sure, but it’s not in some of the things that I’d expect it to be in as a standard. I think in general a lot of the recipes feel underseasoned and cautious—again, that’s maybe the standard of “home cooking” that Bishop was successfully writing towards in 1999. But it’s not my standard. There are a few touches in recipes in the book that I’ll try to remember, and I’ll certainly hold on to one of the best dinners I’ve had in a restaurant in the company of my much-missed father, but…
VERDICT: It’s leaving my shelves. May some other home cook find it more useful someday.