After a couple of weeks of thinking and cooking on our own, JC and I had our first day of cooking together, trying a couple of recipes each of us had in our head.

JC’s recipes came from a weekend of cleaning out his pantry, cooking for out of towners. Mine came from recipes I’d been playing with over the past year for various consulting gigs.

We decided to try the black truffle lasagna. I was pretty damn happy with the results of my first experiment but I wanted JC to try it, (and to have him see if he could follow my recipe). I worked on some lemon-rosemary custard cakes – something I’d created about a year ago to pair with a client’s Chardonnay. And I wanted to work together to recreate a recipe that used to be my standby when company showed up, a combination of scallops and apples over greens.

We were going to make JC’s shrimp and mango red curry but the original recipe used a powdered red curry mix, something the test kitchen pantry doesn’t posses. So instead, JC made a yellow curry salad with a pinch of ancho chile, mangoes and tomato. On his shopping list he’d requested 12 shrimp. He failed to mention not to buy shrimpy-shrimp and my sweet, medium sized shrimps shriveled to the point where they played hide and seek with the mango. The salad was a sad, sad attempt to recreate his original curry. That said, there’s something there in that combination of warm shrimp, cold mango and sweet heat. We shall try again with large shrimp and appropriate spice!

We actually scheduled our cooking to overlap with a production meeting where JC had his first opportunity to meet our photographer, Margeaux Bestard and book designer Deborah Daly.

When the guests arrived, I mixed up my newest cocktail, something I’ve been calling Until Dawn, (as in drink this and you will be dancing until…) If you receive my newsletter, you got a sneak preview of this drink back in September. (If you don’t get my newsletter, why haven’t you subscribed?)

The lasagna was predictably delicious. JC had no problem following my recipe, although I had to admonish him for not putting the lasagna under the broiler to give the top layer of parm a crunch. Lasagna is nothing without a crunchy top! (Don’t worry, you can throw it under the broiler after the fact, which we did. The result? Our guests practically applauded. Yay crunch!)

I made a sweet potato and shallot puree as the base for the scallop dish and turned over the scallop part to JC, who has more experience with deglazing – the secret step to making this dish work. Left alone to play at the stove, JC did a brilliant job. We topped the puree with fresh, baby arugula. Then JC added the sauteed apples and the jumbo scallops, which he’d browned to that point of crunch. (I am beginning to think one of the important features of the recipes in this book is going to be texture.) Then he deglazed with red wine vin, swirled it with mustard and made a magical sauce. Well done, JC. The dish was better than I ever remembered.

Dessert was … ok. This was the dish that was tried and true and what did I do? Beat my eggs to the point of stiffness. (Yes, I was trying for innuendo.) But really, I’d originally written the recipe as beat your eggs to stiff peaks. I’ve since changed it to soft peaks, asked two home cooks to try it and seem to have found the proper instruction. Now, why might the stiffness of the peak matter so much to the success of my custard? Because I beat the eggs too far, they separated and left a watery pool at the bottom of the custard cups. Sad, soggy custard, that’s the result of overbeating.

Next time we’re planning a redo on the shrimps and a few more dishes from each of our master list. I’ll keep you posted, hopefully sooner rather than later.