Food..Glorious Food!

Yes, everyone! It's time to talk food. While I have not talked about food very much in my blogging, I am somewhat of a foodie. I keep a running list of restaurants for me and Mr. Swan to try and read about food and chefs for fun. I've also been known to spend too much time looking for the right spice for a new recipe. Needless to say, I was pretty excited for our tasting at Battery Gardens.

We had a perfect early evening in June right on the water in Battery Park.

Here's Mr. Swan looking over our cocktail hour hors d'oeuvres options and cheesing it up for the camera.

Mommy Swan got to come too! I was excited to see her. 

As with most meals we started out with a salad at the beginning.

Below is the frissee salad with blue cheese, poached pears, slivered almonds and orange-lemon vinegarette. My personal favorite. 

I'm sorry that you don't get to see much of the presentation in this and many of the other pictures. I got so excited about eating that I did that first before taking pictures. Oops! :)

Next we have the Lola Rosa Salad, which is basically field greens with madarin oranges (I LOVE manadarin oranges), a slice of brie and honey hazelnut vinaigrette. I missed the boat on a picture of this one. Sorry! 

The arugula salad which had melon, pinenuts, some goatcheese and rhubarb vinaigrette.

We ended up picking the frissee salad. Mr. Swan was favoring the arugula, but my thinkiing is that not everyone likes the bitterness of arugula. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Then we moved on to the main courses. I don't really eat much chicken (although I've started to more since I've started to travel) and eat beef on a rare occasion and usually it's a smidgen of something off of Mr. Swan's plate. Mr. Swan also has something against what he calls "Wedding Chicken." It's from all of his days serving as a teenage DJ for weddings and eating a lot of stuffed chicken (no offense to stuffed chicken breasts). There's nothing wrong with that, it's just not his thing. That being said, I let Mr. Swan take the lead on choosing the meat option. 

Our choices:

Filet mignon with porcini peppercorn sauce, a vegetable melange (which was essentially different kinds of potatos) and grilled asparagus.

(Again I got too happy about the food before taking a pic. Sorry for the pic of half-eaten food!)

I actually liked this as someone who is a non-meat eater, and the asparagus was GREAT! I loves me some grilled asparagus. The filet was juicy and well-seasoned, the asparagus was crisp and the potatos tasted wonderful.

The other beef option we chose to taste was a braised beef with a side of mashed potatos, a warm bean salad which looked more like haricot vert to me and almonds. Mr. Swan raved about this but thought that our guests would prefer the filet mignon.

On to the fish and my domain. I started with the red snapper with a ginger crust, braised Asian vegetables and cardamom rice. Um, the rice was the bomb diggity...it was fragrant, perfectly cooked and was a lovely compliment to the vegetables. I thought the snapper was fine. I am not a huge fan of crusted fish, but this wasn't bad at all. 

Finally for the fish dishes, there was the salmon with a wasabi crust, soba noodles and tofu. While I will eat tofu anytime anywhere I know that it's not really the food of choice for many people. 

BUT..the salmon was soo good that we couldn't pass it up. It was perfectly cooked. We'll be having the salmon with the rice and the vegetables that came with the snapper.

There's also going to be vegetarian option, but we didn't get a chance to taste that. The type A in me is just not going to worry. 

Finally, dessert (the best part ofcourse!)!

Coconut Passion Fruit Mousse

At least it's something you don't get all the time. 

I did think about the chocolate mousse

as an option, but we decided to pass. It was VERY good, and I'm not a major chocoholic. 

Ofcourse we could have gone with the classic and always refreshing sorbet. We loved the presentation!

I was amazed that me, Mr. Swan and Mommy Swan all agreed that we liked the coconut passionfruit mousse. Talk about three different palates in harmony. 

Ofcourse a tasting is much different than mass produced food, but we feel pretty comfortable that we'll be serving our guests a nice meal and they won't be starving. I'll talk about cupcakes in a separate post. 

How was your tasting for the wedding? Was it easy to make the final menu choices?