My name is Chef Houghton with Flavor Excursions.
That's it?
My name is Aksana.
My last name was too long to say.
One video.
Roman Kova.
Yeah, that's right.
That's my last name.
And I help you with Flavor Excursions.
We're team Flavor Excursions.
She's so humble.
Flavor Excursions came about with an idea that I had that's been churning in my head for some years now.
But I just needed the right partner and along comes Aksana.
And so we just started brainstorming on ways to produce a dinner party.
And, you know, I had the food and I needed someone to really step in and help me with the decorations and the planning aspect of it.
And Aksana filled that slot perfectly and takes care of all the plate settings, the decorations, flower assortments, wine pairings if needed and all the little things that round out the dinner besides the food.
That's a short story.
There it is.
Our decorations are always preferred simplicity over expense.
I like working with flowers, some basic elements of the table.
For that particular dinner at Nancy's house, it was plated dinner.
I had a little bit more space on the table to play with.
But generally speaking, there's always flowers. There are going to be candles and I like playing with live decorations, meaning fruit or vegetables because they have such great shapes and textures and colors.
Well, we pick our themes just kind of out of the sky, really.
Sometimes people request, hey, what are you guys doing vegetarian night, which one we haven't done yet, which is probably going to be next month.
But, you know, sometimes it'll happen like that. Sometimes I just start writing a menu and or sometimes it'll be a meal that I made for her.
And it's like, oh man, this would be awesome to change this into a dinner.
We go to the market and see some interesting ingredients that we haven't tried. We just tried doing something with it and a theme would come out of it just out of some ingredients or something like this.
See something on TV. I mean, it's just anything really can inspire.
And that's what keeps me sharp, I think, because besides the obvious fact that I'm not repeating dishes, it's doing different cuisines.
We've done everything from France to Italian to Caribbean to Asian to South American to fried chicken and sake to barbecue and bourbon to, you know, we've done a lot of different things and they're all very different from each other.
And, you know, it just keeps me on point.
Hey, to Nancy's home. Thank you again, Nancy, for welcoming us to a Chateau. It's a perfect. This is a French night. So this is a Chateau-esque home.
It just fits perfect for the theme. First flavor.
So our first course we started out the dinner with was a Guinehan and shrimp terrine.
And we served that with some pickled white asparagus and also pickled fennel.
We followed that one up with the spinach and lentil soup with Pine Street Market Toulouse sausage. That was a hit. And our saffron preamed escargot and puff pastry with camembert.
That was quite delicious with a little bit of fennel salad on that one.
We're getting ready for the third course, which is roasted Guinehan served with the coffee Guinehan thigh.
So coffee is when you take a meat product and you cook it in the fat.
So we cook this in duck fat. Slowly cook. We salt it overnight with other seasonings.
Let it sit overnight, kind of lightly cure it, rinse the cure off the next day.
Submerge it in a lightly heated fat and cook it slow at about 200 to 300 degrees for a few hours.
And you get a nice, very tender, fully cooked Guinehan thigh.
So with that, we're going to put this on the flat top and crisp up, lightly crisp up our thighs.
And while we're doing that, we can be searing off our breast, Guinehan breast.
And these have been brined.
Did they see a salt-sugar solution with some fresh herbs and aromatics to marinate overnight to help with the moisture?
Guinehan's a pretty lean bird.
And we're just trying to get a sear on the breast.
We're not trying to fully cook it, so we're going to finish that in the oven.
But we want to get a little color on the skin so it looks very nice and presentable.
Just like for the confit thigh.
As you can see, it's fully cooked and it's very delicate at this point.
We want to switch out the tongs for spatula.
All we want to do is just crisp up the skin so this is fully cooked.
Perfect.
And the breast a little bit longer.
That's what we're looking for.
That nice golden color, well seared.
And the oven will do the rest of the work.
So we use the breast, we use the thigh, and we also use the livers and the leg meat for the terrine,
which is made by Chef Shane Devereaux.
And we also use the stock.
We made a stock with the bones.
And here this is about two gallons of stock reduced down to a nice demi for this dish.
So we try to use 100% of whatever we're using.
Food brings people together.
Food makes people comfortable and you add wine in the mix, it's a no brainer.
It just relaxes people.
When everyone's kind of eating together, it just makes it, it takes kind of the edge off of being a stranger.
Because you're all kind of eating out of the same bowl, if you will, to a degree.
So that kind of shaves that, I don't know the word I'm looking for, but it makes it more comfortable.
They don't have no choice.
They sit in the table full of people, everybody's talking.
You've got to have to talk to somebody.
Exactly.
The way the menus are prepared, it's just such a great way to have a taste of different regions,
of different menus, and the portions are small enough where you don't feel afraid to try something new.
My favorite course was the escargot pastry.
It was something that I'd never tried before, something very different.
The wine pairings with the food went perfectly.
The whole experience tonight, the house, all of the people, all of the food, everything all together was just amazing.
