come on Irene! (the gourmet version of a hurricane party)
I’m sure a lot of people can boast they rode out Hurricane Irene (aka the hurricane that was supposed to eat the East Coast but filled up on Carolina) with good friends and good food. But how many can say they waited out the storm in a three hundred year old historic estate that houses one of the country’s finest restaurants?
When the news started hyping up New England’s first major hurricane in 20 years, I happened to be in our family’s beach cottage on Cape Cod–awaiting the arrival of Chrysta Wilson, author of Kiss My Bundt: recipes from the award-winning bakery and my dear friend Annette Tomei, chef instructor at the French Culinary Institute and author of EatSomethingSexy’s Eat & Tell column who were scheduled to spend the weekend. But because our cottage is situated on a dune between the ocean and a tidal salt marsh, we decided it wasn’t exactly the safest place to ride out what was billed as a monster storm.
We jumped at the invitation to move to higher ground at our friends’ restaurant, Chillingsworth, considered the best fine dining establishment on Cape Cod. The restaurant has three guest rooms which were, thanks to Irene, going to be empty for the weekend, abandon by tourists fleeing what turned out to be little more than hype. The only payment asked of us was that Annette would teach a choux pastry clinic as the pastry chef was ill and the staff was having trouble producing the dough in the extraordinary pre-storm humidity. It was a brilliant trade off in our opinions!
But first, the cottage had to be storm shuttered and prepared for the storm. My mother decided that the preparations must include eating everything perishable in the refrigerator, in case of loss of power. Annette whipped up some open faced duck and morel sandwiches as well as tatziki and golden beets on sourdough. She also refreshed some left over whole wheat pappardelle and used up the remaining veggies in a tomato and sea bean salad. Chrysta served one of her specialties, hot red velvet cake served with the cream cheese frosting I’d made and chilled in the freezer, on the side. It was all washed down with two bottles of Lucien Albrect Rose Sparkling Wine, which helped ease the pain of putting up the all-weather shutters. (Technically, it was a bottle and a half as I wound up wearing a good part of the first bottle, when it decided to shoot up like a bottle of Sprite spiked with mentos.)
Then, throwing a little extra wine in the car for the long weekend ahead, as well as the meyer lemon bundt cake Chrysta made from fruit my mother had brought from California, we headed to the historic town of Brewster for our gourmet hurricane party.
We arrived in time for dinner Saturday at The Bistro, four women, two dogs and a lot of appetite. (The restaurant boasts an elegant bar and a bistro as well as a fine dining room. Since my mother and I had celebrated her birthday in the dining room only two days prior, we felt it would be far too decadent to repeat the six course meal a second time in the same week.) We allowed our table to order a few appetizers and boy, that table was a pig! In addition to an order of truffle fries, the table had a lobster pizza drizzled with cognac cream, stuffed figs bundled in prosciutto over greens, escargots in a sauce I called hammonaise (something like hollandaise but with that distinct, salty note of ham) and one of my Bistro favorites, crispy rock shrimp. After the table’s orgy of butter, fat and goodness, we each only needed an appetizer to finish off the dinner. I chose panko-crusted oysters over just barely crunchy, pickled vegetables on a bed of wakame seaweed (which is, oddly, one of my favorite things). What my mother and Annette ordered is, at this point, a blur but I do remember Chrysta ordered one of my childhood favorites, the lobster bisque. I probably won’t ever forget that bowl of bisque as my mother, a little too enthusiastically, encouraged Chrysta to “stick her face in it,” which promptly led to everyone at the table, between the fits of giggles, to try to convince me to change the title of my upcoming book from Romancing the Stove to this fabulous new catch phrase.
We sipped Four Graces Pinot Gris (a fitting wine, we thought, for our party of four) followed by a simple and elegant French rose–perfect for pairing with the fried dishes. To finish, we agreed to split a sticky toffee pudding but the table insisted upon adding chocolate bread pudding to the order. Frangelico and Calvados rounded out the meal because this was, after all, a hurricane party! (Bear in mind that the hurricane was still at least 12 hours away.)
We adjourned to the bar, fat and happy from our perfect, pre-hurricane meal. Many of the owners, Pat and Nitzi Rabins’ friends had gathered to blow off steam after spending much of the day, as I had, battening down the hatches, so to speak. The group talked, danced and played with merriment (and enjoyed Chrysta’s freshly baked bundt) until we simply had to let the staff go home. The crowd all moved on to the old local haunt, Brewster’s Woodshed, but our little, homeless foursome had simply dined too well for partying and we adjourned, dogs in tow, to the antique appointed rooms above the restaurant’s dining room.
