Welcome!--originally posted 8/19/10

Welcome to our Rendezvous Inn & Restaurant blog. Our hope is that this will be an enjoyable venture for all involved. Please be aware, though, that while I love to write, I have little free time on my hands. I'm not a blogger, and nary a tweet has emanated from these fingers. Why the blog, then? Well, communicating with our supporters is fun. Also, many on-line comments--Zagat in particular--mention that I visit every table during dinner. This is an ideal-world scenario. More often than not, I'm unable to get out of the kitchen. Or, I may make the rounds in the dining room, and everyone's engaged in conversation, so I don't want to interrupt. Also, I tend to be an introvert. One recent night I cruised the dining room and didn‘t see anyone I knew. I continued on back to the kitchen and said to Lindsey, my sous-chef, "My gosh, I didn't recognize a single face out there." For me, that's scary.


So, let's get started. I'm not of the opinion that anything I have to say will be particularly important, and I hope none of it ever becomes self-important. I don't like the whole celebrity chef thing. Which, along with comfort, is one of the reasons you will almost never see me in a chef's jacket. Now, you may see Lindsey in a chef's jacket, or not. Comfort, I think. Certainly not pretension. She is both as good at what she does, and at the same time as unpretentious, as anyone can be.

Cookbook? Yes, maybe. The most frequently heard comment I get is: "You should write a cookbook." Like blogging, where's the time? I appreciate the comment, however, and consider it a compliment. To a certain extent, the groundwork has been laid, as I was fortunate enough to have someone in the kitchen who took it upon herself to type up all our recipe cards...an unimaginably formidable task. She's now close to finishing up the two-year program at the Culinary Institute of America back east in Hyde Park. In our eyes, she's one of the many Rendezvous "stars" we've been fortunate enough to have.

Recipes however, are in commercial-kitchen-ese, mostly in commercial quantities. Many of the procedural portions assume you're a professional chef. Sometimes an ingredient will be listed, with no clue as to where it's supposed to participate in the recipe. Frequently, too, we tweak recipes as we try to improve them. Since our cooking tends to be very seasonal, changes may be yearly. Thus a recipe for a wild mushroom soup, for example, will have the 2006, 2007 and 2008 versions all crossed out, and the 2009 version there. It can all get very confusing.

A couple of years ago, a lady from Iowa pleaded for the recipe for the sauce we serve with the rack of lamb. She wanted to give it to her husband for Christmas. The sauce takes us four days to make. Lamb stock, to lamb demiglace, to sauce which sits overnight to let the flavors meld, to reducing, thickening and seasoning. We had to execute the recipe four times in order to scale it down to home kitchen quantities, and deal with procedures such as "reduce to sauce consistency." While this may he an extreme example, you get the idea.

I think this may be enough for now...enough to get us started. Let us hear from you!