My birthday dinner had some hits and some misses.

First Course: Salmon cured with mint, cucumber, and dill on sushi rice. The
salmon had been cured too long. As a result, it was too salty and too firm.
The tastes of the cucumber and vodka were lost, and the mint was just barely
discernible. Lesson learned: Remove salmon from the cure much earlier, and
use a *lot* more cucumber and mint.

Second Course: Tempura squash blossoms. These were nice, but a bit plain.
Lin was also a bit worried about the fat content. I think I could have come
up with something more elaborate with more planning, but this ingredient was
kind of sprung on me. Initially, I had planned to make a
sunchoke-and-avocado salad, but no sunchokes could be found. This was a
first for me; I hadn't realized that there *was* a sunchoke season, because
every time I've looked for them in the past, my local Safeway had them on
the shelves. We still have squash blossoms we haven't cooked; I think they'd
be very good in quesadillas.

Third Course: Smoked tomato soup with watercress and cheddar. I had planned
to make cheddar powder using aged cheddar and tapioca maltodextrin. But it
never powdered, for some reason, so I ended up with cheddar granules.
Nevertheless, this was a very good course. Lin hickory-smoked the tomatoes,
and the soup was beautifully flavored by the smoke, the cheese, and the
watercress leaves which had been puréed with a tiny bit of extra-virgin
olive oil. The soup was made by putting the smoked tomatoes through a food
mill, then through a conical strainer, salting to taste, then adding the
cheddar and the watercress purée on top.

Fourth Course: Country-style ribs braised in foil with plums, habañeros,
allspice, and salt. I donned gloves to remove the seeds and membranes from
the chiles, and then left the chiles in fairly large chunks so they could be
avoided if they were too spicy to eat. The combination was amazing: The pork
was unctuous, the plums picked up a bit of the floral flavor and heat of the
chiles, and the allspice blended it all together seamlessly. *Definitely*
worth doing again.

Fifth Course: Watermelon "pickled" with rice vinegar and shiso. Shiso turned
out to be fairly hard to find. None of the herb farmers around here had it,
so Lin had to buy it from a sushi restaurant we patronize regularly. This is
a bit hard to explain, since I've gotten perilla (of which shiso is a
specific variety) in my CSA boxes before. The watermelon pickle was
intriguing: sweet, sour, and exotic-herbaceous. I can't say it wowed me with
its flavor, but there wasn't anything bad about it, and it was very
interesting. I'm glad I tried it, but I probably won't do that again.

Sixth Course: Liquefied popcorn with honey-pepper foam. This was intended as
a kind of drifting-toward-dessert course. It's made by popping popcorn, then
cooking the popcorn with butter, sugar, salt, and water. That results in a
kind of popcorn mush. The mush gets blended and then put through a fine
strainer. So far, the recipe is from _Alinea_, the cookbook from the
restaurant of that name. But that recipe goes on to make a foam from caramel
and soy lecithin. Instead of doing that, I infused honey with black pepper,
then made a foam from the strained honey, egg whites, water, and lemon
juice. The foamer had to be chilled for six hours before the foam was ready
to dispense. To serve, the room-temperature popcorn stuff was put into
little porcelain sake bowls and the foam was dispensed on top. Yowza! This
was another hit. We had a bunch of the foam and the corn stuff left over, so
I consolidated them and I am currently freezing the mixture in my ice cream
machine.

Seventh Course: Apricot "anti-lava" bar and cinnamon hot chocolate. The
"anti-lava" bar was made by cooking dried apricots and apricot nectar
together until the apricots were soft. That mixture was blended and put into
little containers (two tablespoons? somewhere around that size), then put
into the freezer until frozen on the outside but still liquid inside. The
cinnamon hot chocolate was made by melting milk chocolate in hot milk, then
sprinkling with cinnamon. The idea was to put a spoonful of the ice-cold
apricot stuff into your mouth, then take a sip of the hot chocolate. This
was a FANTASTIC way to end the meal; the flavor combination was so
astoundingly yummy I could have cartwheeled for joy.

The meal was accompanied by a chilled Riesling from Navarro Vineyards and by
ginger-peach iced tea. By the time we thought about taking pictures, we were
already into the ribs, so we just blew it off.

All-in-all, it was an enjoyable and memorable meal!

Bob, reeling from the Riesling