I think it’s only fair, since I obsessed at least twice on this blog about preparation for the dinner I served Saturday, to tell you how it went. Well. It went well. But not without a hitch!

I finally settled on an idea for the duck, but the real wrench was Friday after work finding out that my fishmonger did not get a catch of fresh anchovies. My plan was to do an overnight cure and serve them Zuni-style with nicoise olives, reggiano, and celery. But there was no time to canvass the city looking for fresh anchovies, so I resolved to go to the market Saturday morning and improvise.

Here’s the final menu:

Mango Bellini
Duck Rillettes Crostini
Halibut Cheek with Sea Urchin Roe and a Slice of Mango
Stinging Nettle Tagliatelle with Goat Sugo and Goat Cheese
Duck Two Ways: Seared Breast, Cabernet Reduction, Beluga Lentils; Duck-Fried Duck, Biscuit, Long-cooked Greens
Bay Leaf Panna Cotta, Candied Kumquats

Sea urchin roe. How did this happen?! How did I find myself at two in the afternoon, while the sugo bubbled away white wine and the Royals were losing, with a scary sea urchin and a knife? Like many good foolish things, a mixture of impetuosity and naïveté. On the BART to the ferry building I tried and tried to decide on something that would be seasonal and awesome and also light enough to ease my guests into all that pasta and meat and duck fat. Gazing over the beautiful spring produce, I thought to make a simple spring pea sformatino with some pea shoots and a thin slice of bottarga, that magical paste that eloquently accompanied the sformatino at Da Delfina.

Okay, so bottarga. Problem being the Italian deli and then the next fancy foods store I went into inside gave me blank looks, leading me to wonder if I was, like, radically mispronouncing bottarga (totally possible). I went into the fish market with the full knowledge that it was very unlikely that they would carry it, but it was worth a shot. And inside, they had these gorgeous halibut cheeks for at least a not-homely price. And sea urchin. I had a bag of halibut cheeks, I remembered the roe reminding me of a mango, so all right.

Sea urchin! In 2005, I spent a month in Greece. One of the first days there, my friend and guide Siarita took us swimming outside of Athens. She picked an urchin straight out of the sea, cut into it then and there, and expertly coaxed the sections of orange roe from the cavity, directly into her mouth. In my very stupid vegetarian way, I passed on trying it. This was my opportunity for atonement.

Still, I had no idea what to do with the thing. I did what any late-twenty-something American with a problem would do: I consulted YouTube. YouTube, the go to resource for R Kelly parodies, instructions on how to tie a cravat, and videos of young Japanese people ripping apart sea urchins on the beach.

It was fairly easy, in the end. I cut into the shell at the top, which is either the mouth or the anus (a distinction normally much more important), carefully chipped off the top, and with as much delicacy as I had in me, pulled the five orange gonads out with a spoon. The number was sheer luck: I was cooking for five, so each of us could taste one of the thick, delicious organs.

Everything else went pretty well, i.e. nothing caught on fire and nobody stormed away from the table, bitter at being a guinea pig in my lab of sea urchin horrors. I was especially happy with the goat sugo, which I let bubble for eight hours on the stove while the Royals lost and sea urchins were dismembered before my very eyes.

But I am sad to report that the bay leaf panna cotta? Totally did not work. I took Sam’s suggestion to heart and let the buttermilk steep with bay leaves, and I even added several sprigs of thyme to the cream in a vain attempt to convey any herbaceousness whatsoever. Luckily, buttermilk panna cotta is pretty good no matter what, and the kumquats were an adequate companion. If I could just be a fly on the wall in the kitchen at Incanto, I could do this better. Or, you know, if the pastry chef at Incanto wants to comment on this blog, anonymous comments are totally welcomed, and, in this case, encouraged!

I’m hosting a dinner on Saturday night. Now, despite the fact that this dinner is for my girlfriend, a coworker and his boyfriend, and an ex-coworker, all of whom are 1) awesome, 2) into food, 3) palatally adventurous, which should be a recipe for keywords like “casual,” “low key,” etc., I am already in full obsessive mode about it. And instead of obsessing privately, I figure, fuck, I have a food blog! So I can just obsess in public!

As mentioned, I’m almost totally eschewing the tried-and-true stick-with-what-you-do-best mantra. And rehearsing, and testing, and failing, and succeeding. But even this is complicated because I keep changing my mind about the menu; and not just the menu, but the belle of the ball (at least in theory), the, you know, last non-dessert course.

I’m pretty sure about the rest, though I reserve the right to panic on Friday night (or even Saturday morning) and pull a Rauschenbergian erasure on the whole thing. I’m pretty sure that the meal will start with a variation on the sidecar and leek tartare, followed by my take on Judy Rodger’s house-cured anchovies with nicoise olives, thinly sliced celery, and reggiano. I wanted to follow that with a springtime pasta, so I’m intending to make a stinging nettle tagliatelle and make a sugo, I think primarily with goat, that’s going to cook all day long. And at the very end I’m going to serve that goddamned bay leaf panna cotta, which will just scream bay leaf with every bite. Knock wood.

So, sound okay? Okay. But it’s the plate in between goat sugo and bay leaf panna cotta that I’ve gone back and forth about so many times. I decided that I wanted to do some kind of mixed grill, or low-rent-Michael-Mina rip off. At first I was going to try to work with my friend rabbit. I love rabbit, and I especially love rabbit cooked by Tuscans in Tuscany. Rabbit cooked by Brandon in the Mission is all right, but I kept getting the screaming night sweats about it not being all right enough. So, now, I’m pretty sure I’m going to present my friend duck.

As of the time of this post, I am not sure what I’ll do. I hope that it will involve the beautiful beluga lentils we bought at Rainbow Grocery this weekend, and I hope that it will involve sautéed arugula rabe. And I’m starting to have this perverse fantasy of making a duck liver pupusa. But there’s one thing I do know. Somewhere on that plate will be thin slices of duck breast cooked rare with a wine sauce.

Yesterday for supper I gave that a shot. This shot (of my shot) is my way of confessing that the breast was really medium rare, but which gave me a better sense of how to do it right Saturday. It was so simple, but (salivating blogger). I scored the skin of two breasts to make diamond patterns, seasoned them well, then sautéed them skin-side down over medium-high heat until the skin was brown and crisp, then turned the breasts and let them cook for four minutes. And that was it. This one will have another chance to shine, Saturday night. But its playmates are yet to be determined.