Bust

Menu: Shrimp Bisque; Green Salad with Strawberries and Goat Cheese; Garlic Bread

Lessons learned:

1. It's time to give up on the bisque recipe.  It's not going to happen for me.
2. The strawberry salad doesn't work as well with regular lettuce.

I was optimistic about my Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home book when I ordered it last year.  It's mostly vegetarian and is devoted to very simple recipes with easy-to-find ingredients.  And I have found some gems in there.  The shrimp bisque is, disappointingly, not one of them.

I first tried the recipe a couple of months ago.  It was tasty; the only problem was that the milk separated, so it looked kind of nasty.  This is a common problem when I combine milk, acid (the soup contains lemon juice), and heat.  This time I tried to avoid it by heating the milk up before adding it to the soup, and keeping the heat very low.  That only slowed the separation; by the time we ate it, it looked very curdled.  And this time the taste was much worse; it was sort of watery and flavorless.  All I could taste was the curry powder.

Oh well.  The bread was good.