Appetizer. Tomato salad 2.0 – It’s interesting to look at how a dish evolves from its inception to the final product. Without any iterations/failures, the dishes can’t get any better. I originally bought the mozzarella (wanted to buy a burrata, but couldn’t find it in Brampton) for the previous tomato salad but never got around to it using it that day and so it ended up on this plate.

For the green giant tomato, I just cut it in rough chunks and salted it slightly, leaving over a strainer allowing the water to fall through, I also reserved the pulp to be mixed in with the water afterwards. For the other tomatoes, some of them were quickly blanched to remove the skin, while others were just left as-is to preserve the beautiful colour. The rest of the dish was pretty straightforward: place the cheese, add some jelly, spoon on some crumble (store-bought) and garnish with flowers and leaves from the backyard. With various flavours and textures, we didn’t have any complaints about this dish at all. If anything, we wanted more. With more and more tomatoes ripening in the backyard, we will definitely make this again.

Main. Fun fact # 15648515649 – this piece of vension was shot and butchered by the in-laws. This dish turned out relatively well, the steak was cooked properly in my opinion and had enough time to rest so the juices did not run out onto the plate. For the carrot, I did a pumpkin seed walnut, millet, and quinoa granola. It was nice, but needed to have some other element to ensure that it stayed on the carrot. The carrot was a little bit undercooked but Megan said it was fine, perhaps in a second iteration I might cut it into smaller pieces for eat-ability. The blueberry sauce was just a reduction, finished with some balsamic and seasoned with salt.

Dessert. In this dessert, there is a round choux at the bottom, on top of that, there was a honey madeleine cake, mini choux balls along with some honey whipped ganache. It was garnished with fresh figs and toasted, chopped pistachios. I had some issues getting the bottom choux the right size so it wasn’t as hollow as I wanted it to be. I will definitely try to do that again at some point to get the size just right. I did it properly with the kiddies at school a while back, but couldn’t find my notes anywhere. I also made a nice tuile garnish, but it looked kind of silly in the end so I left it out.

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