The birthday dinner

It's becoming something of a tradition in my home now, that my gift-giving take the form of preparing a gourmet meal for the honored. I shudder to think how that could wind up working out if I'm still here on Christmas or Thanksgiving.

Last night's dinner for my stepfather's birthday was actually a repeat of the meal I prepared for Mother's Day: Chicken Alfredo, Caesar salad, and cheesecake.

The Alfredo is a simple traditional recipe, of cream, butter, and Parmesan cheese. The most important step here is simply getting the right cream. Much of the "heavy cream" sold in stores doesn't seem to have the thickness needed to really do the recipe justice, most of it seems to made with heavy cream, but then diluted heavily with skim milk. The trick seems to be to give the carton a good shake. If it makes no noise, you've got it good. If it sloshes around like you would expect from a carton of milk, look for another brand. I actually had to go to two different stores to find a decent heavy cream.

For the Caesar salad, I made some simple croûtons of toasted bread tossed with olive oil and, once again, that good old Johnny's mix (I really do abuse that stuff, don't I?) For the dressing, I bought Cardini's, the original Caesar dressing, from the man who invented the stuff. It's interesting too, because it really doesn't much like any other dressing that's routinely sold as "Caesar dressing", but it's very good stuff.

For the cheesecake, as I had discovered that we didn't have a suitable pan for making cheesecake, I instead went ahead and bought a pre-made plain New York style from the bakery. And prepared my own topping, using a recipe for cherry confit culled from Tyler Florence's recipe for New York style cheesecake. I'm not entirely certain it came out properly however. It seems thinner than the recipe and picture imply, and I may have used fewer cherries than I should have. I was on time constraint however, and pitting the cherries was proving rather time consuming, so I stopped when it looked like I had about a pound as per the recipe. I think in hindsight I will next time use about as many cherries, but half the syrup content.

All in all though, the meal was delicious, and seemed to be well received, and I know I certainly enjoyed it.