So how did the cookbook do?
My trusty sous-chef and I set to work this morning.
Some overall thoughts. The advantage with this particular gathering menu is that it’s a picnic with room temperature dishes that would hold up pretty well overnight if you made them the day before (in some cases they might be even better). I think you’d be pretty overwhelmed if you were honestly making this for 6-12 people or more as a complete picnic meal and you tried to make it the morning of the picnic. It’s a very very multi-pan, multi-pot thing if you’re doing the whole thing.
There are a lot of preparations and sub-preparations and if you were following the recipes tightly, they each have a fussy component or procedure that takes some attention. For my tastes, too much so. If I’m making 4-6 dishes for a picnic, I want half of them to be pretty straightforward with one or two big deals that have some show-off cookery involved.
I didn’t quite come across things that I thought were untested but I did think there was some slight underthinking of the recipes for less-experienced home cooks. For example, the chicken pies call for a sofrito, which is just a very finely minced vegetable base for a lot of savory cooking—usually onions, garlic, bell or hot peppers (or both), maybe carrots or celery, and then maybe a fresh green herb. The amount called for is 1/4 a cup, which is fine, but the recipe refers the cook to a sofrito on another recipe later in the book which makes a larger amount. I tend to think that if you’re calling a cook to a standard version of a condiment or component listed elsewhere in a cookbook, you want to explicitly remind them to adjust the amounts. This isn’t a sofrito that saves well for further use. In this case it’s especially important because the sofrito and the pie filling as a whole both have cilantro in them (as well as onion). There’s a textural difference that’s important—the onion in the sofrito is minced, the onion in the pie is chopped—but I could see a home chef getting confused, frustrated or ending up with a pie filling that tastes overwhelmingly of cilantro.
That’s another issue here—the flavors felt to me like they overlapped too much. There’s space inside the flavor profile in these dishes to spread out a bit. In the end I did just that—I decided to fiddle with the cantalope-tomato salad a bit because there’s already another preparation with ripe tomatoes in it, the burrata-cauliflower dish.
I made some substitutions elsewhere. There’s supposed to be golden raisins in the fennel slaw. Raisins are one of the few things I actually dislike. There’s supposed to be hazelnuts in there too and mint. I switched everything up: some small bits of dried apricot for the raisins, some walnuts, some basil. I think that worked and it spread the pan-Mediterranean flavors out a bit. I substituted poblano peppers in the chicken pies because I just hate the bland vegetative flavor of standard green bell peppers. So boring.
Ultimately:
We all liked the pies a lot. It’s kind of hard to go wrong with little chicken pies in savory dough but these were good and basic. I don’t think the nigella seeds would change them dramatically.
The frittatta was good. It’s got zucchini, mint, and about a cup of rice in it, with feta on top. However, I’m not so sure the rice really worked, and that’s how my co-diners felt too. Dressing it with yogurt mixed with fennel pollen on top is a great idea, though—that tasted really good.
The burrata-tomato salad with the cauliflower relish was great-looking but it really did not work at all as a combination of flavors. The relish just buries the rich dairy flavor of the burrata. It’s the kind of thing that I think everybody at the very stylish City Picnic would be admiring and taking pictures of and then not eating very much. (The idea to layer it in a mason jar is a good one, though, and worth ripping off for something else.)
I liked my version of the fennel slaw, with little bits of dried apricot, walnut and basil rather than golden raisin, hazelnuts and mint. I’d probably be fine with the other version. I pretty much love mandolin-sliced fennel regardless.
Tomatoes and melon were good. I’m glad I used lime juice rather than lemon and I’m glad I skipped the mustard oil, which just didn’t feel like a good idea.
VERDICT:
The sous-chef liked it.
The co-eaters were sort of meh. I was too.
GONE. It’s leaving my shelves. My daughter might take it—she likes the pictures and some of the recipe ideas.