Food and Farniente: Ever have a cheese hangover?

Happy New Year everybody!! I wish you a happy and healthy 2012, filled with lots of flavour, fun, and fibre. Fibre before wealth, man. Always. As for me, the one resolution I intend to stick with this year is to blog more than once or twice a month. Don't be shy to call me on it if you get more than a fifteen-day waiting period between posts. I have no kids. Ergo, I have no excuses.

So with that in mind, let's get things started off right by me telling you about the best cancelled-at-the-last-minute-New-Year's-Eve-dinner-for-six I've ever had! The reason for the cancellation doesn't matter (double-bookings, less-than-firm rsvp's, too much farniente and not enough follow-ups... You know - the usual). All that matters is that Marc and I found ourselves face to face at our dinner table last night, with two bottles of bubbly, insane amounts of cheese and MY NEW RACLETTE SET!

All that's missing now is the cheeeeeese!

I don't know why I'm so tickled by food trends of days gone by. The BIB, cheese balls, raclette... Maybe it's the historian in me (did I mention I ultimately became an archivist after cooking school?), or maybe it's my way of flirting with disaster, by attempting hipster cool in the ever menacing shadow of not-cool-enough-to-pull-this-off lameness. But, as usual, I digress...

I know very little about raclette, besides the obvious basics that it originates in Switzerland, it was probably invented by hungry herders, and it involves meats, potatoes, pickled things and, most importantly, cheese (seriously - the Swiss must climb a lot of mountains, with the amount of cheese they eat). Normally, I would have done a bit of research in order to get the necessary ingredients and traditions right, but I thought, meh - it's melted cheese on stuff. How can I go wrong? I'm not Swiss. Marc's not Swiss. The dogs aren't Swiss. No one will know.

So off I went to Costco to pick up some nicely priced Emmenthal, to accompany a few more cheeses that were still hanging around my fridge from the Christmastime food-a-palooza. Oddly, it's also at Costco that I found my inspiration for what would go under the cheese; a less than poetic, plastic-wrapped two-pack of dried California figs. I figured the Swiss probably didn't put figs in their raclette, but that didn't matter. I started thinking about antipasti platters; what do figs go well with? Nuts! Mmmm. Then I turned another corner and saw prosciutto cotto (a.k.a. cooked ham with a fancy name). Angels sang. This was going to be good. So with a few more stops on the way home - butcher, baker, candlestick maker - we were all set for dinner!

And what a dinner it was. I don't know if it was anywhere close to traditional, but it's traditional in our house as of now. The lesson of that evening? Have raclette! It's way more fun than fondue and it's a great way to let your imagination fly! When you're planning your meal, just think: would cheese taste good on that? If the answer is yes, THEN GO FOR IT!!

Oopsie. Please forgive that pen in the upper-right corner.
Don't drink and photograph. The risk of pen-in-photo is too great.

In case you're curious, here's the ingredients list from last night:

prosciutto cotto (or other good quality cooked ham);
local bison steak, cut thinly into wide strips (put your knife on a diagonal instead of cutting straight down);
house-made pork and beef breakfast sausages from Boucherie Gréber;
asparagus, cooked al-dente and shocked in an ice bath;
boiled potatoes (salt the water appropriately, because they'll be a let-down under the cheese!);
caramelized onions (I cooked three big ones for two people);
jardinière (a mix of cauliflower, carrots and peppers. Thanks Shannon!);
pecans;
dried figs, sliced into four or five pieces each;
baguette, just because.