Bonjour mes amis! Apologies for going AWOL on y'all the past few months. I've been contending with some health issues including emergency surgery here in Paris but I'm finally getting my energy back and am ready to cook!
My last Phenomenal Women Dinner was so heartwarming I thought I'd try it on the other side of the ocean so this winter when I was back in San Francisco, I gathered my posse for lunch and toasted to another group of phenomenal women....sans shoe. As I was planning the meal a few days before, I realized I'd left my fabulous chocolate stilleto back in Paris. Quelle horreur! What to do?! I needed something fabulous on the table to salute these fabulous women so rather than print the inspiring Maya Angelou poem, Phenomenal Women, on the back of the menu like I did previously, I decided to buy everyone the single poem book adorned with Paul Gaugin's "Woman with a Fan". Thank God for Amazon.com and 2-day delivery!
Of course a meal chez moi isn't complete without a culinary disaster and this one was no excpetion. The evening before I realized my immersion blender was back in Paris in good company with my chocolate stilleto. AAAAAAAK! How was I going to puree the soup?! I rushed off to the store minutes before it closed. They only had the cordless kind that plugged into the wall to charge. Fine. Whatever. Ring it up. I plugged the blender into the wall and went to sleep.
The next morning as guest arrival time was quickly approaching, we went to blend the soup and my trusty new immersion blender whirred for about 28 seconds then sputtered out. AAAAAAAK! It needed to charge for 24 hours. Damn! I dug out my 10 year old Cuisinart, washed off the inch and a half of dust and grime from 9-1/2 years of sitting in the box, and started blending in batches. Disaster averted. It was still too thick but at least it didn't look like cat hurl anymore. I topped the soup with a star shaped slice of beet and a drizzle of truffle oil. Et voila!