Yesterday's motto was "Cook fast, die young".
The reason we picked this motto was that Sylvia had to go to work really early today, so we had to really hurry since usually, to cook and eat our four to six courses takes about 8 or 9 hours.
So the challenge yesterday was to get done in 5 hours!
Fortunately, Frank brought an already prepared, fantastic chicken soup:
So we only had to heat that up, and we had our quick first course.
While heating up the soup, we prepared the beef roulades for the main course:
We fried the roulades sharply on all sides, put them in a roasting dish with a lot of mirepoix, fried it some more, deglazed them with a generous amount of Port and put it all in the oven.
After the soup, with the roulades in the oven, I wanted a quick salad, so I took some leftover beef from the roulades, a little honey, some Port and some balsamic vinegar and made it into a jus which we used as dressing for a small salad with steak stripes and oranges:
Here's a picture of Frank revisiting the jus:
After we had the salad, the roulades were almost done, so we had to get started with the red cabbge and the potato dumplings.
We added some apples and cloves to the cabbage, glazed it in butter, added some red wine and then let it simmer for a couple of minutes.
We took the roulades out of the sauce, filtered the liquid, seasoned the sauce and thickened it with a little cornstarch. Cooked the roulades in the sauce for about 10 more minutes and then served them with the cabbage and a dumpling:
While eating the roulades, we were already cooking out the next dish in the oven:
Hazelnut-Marzipan Roast Apple:
We served the apples with a ball of vanilla ice and - believe it or not - we were done in under 5 hours.
