Duck Day 2024 Wrap-up & Picspam!

Duck Day 2024: Foods & Dishes You Can’t Get Anymore

Here we go, our annual Thanksgiving gourmet cooking extravaganza, in which we make no turkey, but do make duck. Each year with a different theme.

This entire menu came about because when we sat down to plan this year’s theme and looked into our notes for recipe ideas, one said “choco taco” and another said “numb nuts ice cream sundae.”

You might think that meant we wanted to do all frozen confections, but no… the common thread that connects those two dots is “Foods you can’t get anymore.”

The ChocoTaco was infamously discontinued in 2022, more on that later. “Numb nuts” were one of the bar snacks we often enjoyed at a restaurant called Night Market, which had been a terrific but somewhat short-lived (2014-2019) place in Harvard Square. At Night Market, chef Jason Tom plied his jazzy takes on Asian street foods in a tiny street-art decorated basement space that made it feel like a fried-rice speakeasy.

I’ve often recreated a few of Night Market’s standards at home, including their sweet kaya toast served with a raw egg yolk swimming in soy sauce. (This reminds me I have yet to try making their “Lik’Em Stik”, which was rice balls served with a “dip” of tasty bits that included black beans, fried garlic, and other stuff—maybe crunchy soy beans? maybe chili crisp? tiny dried shrimp?—I’m not sure exactly what was in it and this may be part of why I haven’t yet tried to recreate it.)

Anyway. We all know that yearning for a dish we can’t get anymore. This menu is an homage to restaurants we miss.

One note before we dive in, because it is a historic first: This year not only did we sit down to eat on time at 8pm, we actually stayed on our always-ambitious schedule of serving a course every 30 minutes!

For two amateur home cooks like us, the timeline is often blown out of the water immediately and only gets slower throughout the evening. We always create a run sheet with specific times for when things need to go in our out of the oven, when water should be set to boil, etc… but the timeline is typically “aspirational.” This time we actually managed to stay on time right until the last course when we actually slowed intentionally to give people a break!

A huge part of that was that we actually did all the prep we intended, including pre-plating some elements. We had started cooking on the Saturday before, and we both spent at least 6-10 hours cooking on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. This year we also did more test-cooking of new recipes in the weeks leading up than usual, and a lot of our skills continue to level up. So, incredibly, we were ready to serve dessert and coffee at midnight. This has never happened before–and who knows if it ever will again?

The menu:

• Jamaican Party Duck from Heck
• The Antidote
• A Journeyman-style “Salad”
• Suanla Chou Shou (But Duck)
• Pandan ice cream sundae palate cleanser
• Beef Brisket Chow Fun (But Duck)
• Tinga de Pollo (But Duck)
• An artisinal “choco taco”

COURSE 1: EAST COAST GRILL

Jamaican Party Duck from Heck

based on the East Coast Grill’s “Jamaican Party Beef from Hell”

corwin and I had our first date at the East Coast Grill in 1991. Some of you might remember that at the time the two of us were both power bottoms, and when some of our friends in the BDSM scene heard we were going on a date, asked “But what will you guys do?” Did just how endorphin high we got on extremely spicy food that night have something to do with how instantly we bonded? Who can say?

Our delightfully sadistic waiter described “Jamaican Party Beef from Hell” as (complete deadpan) “We take beef slice it thin pound it thinner serve it with a spicy slaw made me cry.”

The East Coast Grill, which opened in 1985, became infamous in the 1990s for their “from hell” dishes, and for being on the leading edge of the 1990s hot sauce fad with their Inner Beauty hot sauce. They were a spark that ignited innovation in Boston’s food (and cocktail!) scene, and many alums of ECG went on to keep that fire burning (Tony Maws of Craigie on Main, Paul O’Connell of Chez Henri, Andy Husbands of Tremonet 647, Patrick Sullivan of B-Side Lounge, and I’m sure many others I don’t even know about).

When East Coast Grill celebrated their 26^th anniversary, we celebrated our 20th, and we went there for a “Throwback Week” where they promised “the 1980s menu at the 1980s prices.” For the occasion, chef Chris Schlesinger recreated the party beef for us, but other than that, the dish only lived on in our memories. This is our first attempt at recreating something like it, though our spice tolerance isn’t what it once was.

“Party Duck from Heck” has been sliced thin and marinated in our recreation of Chris’s Inner Beauty Hot Sauce with one main substitution: mango juice for papaya juice. (The recipe used to be on Serious Eats. It’s gone now, but lives on in Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/seriouseats/comments/6v8495/comment/dlyq3k6/) We also used an assortment of peppers in place of the habañeros, resulting in a sauce that had that extreme deliciousness of Inner Beauty, but was not quite as scalding on the Scoville scale.

Here’s the recipe, which we scaled way down:

1 pound scotch bonnet peppers
12 ounces yellow mustard
2 ounces brown sugar
6 ounces white vinegar
2 ounces orange juice
2 ounces honey
2 ounces molasses
6 ounces papaya juice (we substituted mango juice and loved the result)
6 ounces pineapple juice
6 ounces oil
1/3 ounces each cumin, chili powder, curry , turmeric, and allspice
Salt and pepper to taste

Procedure: Throw everything in a blender and puree.

Inner Beauty is really freakin delicious and I had forgotten just how tasty it was.

PAIRING:

At ECG, on their infamous “Hotter Than Hell” nights—everything on the menu was “From Hell”—one item was listed on the menu as “The Antidote.”

The Antidote was a creamsicle, gleefully brought by the kitchen staff en masse wearing fire brigade hats. So the Duck Day pairing was an actual miniature homemade creamsicle (fresh squeezed orange and tangerine juice with home made vanilla ice cream), with an optional shot-sized creamsicle cocktail.

The orange portion of the creamsicle was based on the recipe here: https://www.coinedcuisine.com/orange-creamsicle-popsicles/ using fresh squeezed orange and tangerine juice, agave, and heavy cream, and corwin made the vanilla ice cream on his usual recipe.

COURSE 2: JOURNEYMAN

A Journeyman-style “Salad”

If you know me, then you know I hate salad, but I love good fresh vegetables, which means over the years our salad course has been refashioned into everything from a lettuce wrap to  gazpacho. Even if I like all the components of a salad, the main thing I hate about salad is the unpleasant experience of eating a bowl of rabbit food.

At Journeyman, Tse Wei Lim and Diana Kudarova’s restaurant (2010-2017) that was our favorite pioneer to really highlight bistronomy in our area, the salad was always deconstructed. It was more like the concepts of salad—a light course, of vegetable matter, served cold, before the main dishes—assembled onto the plate in an aesthetically pleasing way. This is perfect because it’s everything I love about salad without the negative rabbit-food experience. A Journeyman salad was art. It allows you to enjoy all the things about a salad, but in a choose-your-own-adventure way.

I knew the plate would need to have at least two smears or streaks of some kind, something green, some root vegetables (because seasonal), something cubed, and probably something pickled. Here’s what we ended up with based on what corwin could find at the winter farmer’s market:

• Pickled radish three ways
  • black-skinned white daikon in yuzu rind
  • watermelon radish in rice vinegar
  • purple daikon in brine
• Roasted multi-color carrots (white, purple, yellow, and orange)
• Brussels sprouts (tossed in duck fat vinaigrette)
• Miso butter sweet potato puree
• Compressed miniature cucumbers
• Mango-pineapple gastrique
• Duck fat sourdough croutons

Wine pairing: Sebastien Girost Rosé de Saignée Champagne

Serving the individual leaves of the brussels sprouts is something corwin has been avoiding doing since our very first meal at a “tweezer food” restaurant, Radius, Michael Schlow’s place that ran from 1999-2013 and which was for a long time was one of only a handful of “Michelin star level”* places in Boston (along with Clio, L’Espalier, and No. 9 Park).

(*There are no Michelin-starred restaurants in Massachusetts because local governments refuse to pony up the rumored multi-million dollar payoff it takes to get Michelin to add a new city/region. Boston has no inferiority complex and therefore does not feel the need. We know we have Nightshade Noodle Bar and Giulia and Moeca and multiple Beard Award winners like Barbara Lynch… and heck, it’s already hard enough to get a table those places. If Michelin came in, we’d have to fight off tourists for those seats!)

The duck fat viniagrette came from The Pelleh Poultry website, and included shallots sauteed in duck fat, apple cider vinegar, honey, and mustard. I made it the day ahead, emulsified it with a whisk, and was amazed to see it was still emulsified the next day.

I cut the radishes in ways I thought highlighted their beauty and then pickled each one differently, overnight.

Sweet potatoes in New England are a seasonal staple, and far better than sweet potatoes grown anywhere else. The combination of the rocky soil and the cold weather here makes them incredibly tasty. Combined with miso butter, the puree could be eaten as is or used as a dip for other elements on the plate.

Compressed cucumbers were made in the chamber vacuum. corwin didn’t use a recipe; he just winged it.

He made the croutons from a pan au levain he had baked a week earlier. They were maybe a touch too hard for this salad, where they didn’t get softened at all by being tossed with a dressing, but if the rate at which we’re eating the leftover ones today as a snack is any indication, I would say they came out terrific. Duck fat for the win. (Cube the bread, tossed in duck fat and salt and pepper, bake at 350 degrees until the desired degree of crunch is achieved.)

The reason we can’t have a salad like that every night is that it takes a week to source and make all the elements. Came out exactly the way I wanted, though. (corwin kept trying to add lettuce to it; I kept saying no.)

And yes, I used tweezers to plate the salad.

One of corwin’s criteria for a great restaurant is if they can get him to like an ingredient he didn’t previously like, and that was Radius and brussels sprouts. He knew they were going to be fussy and a pain to separate, so he avoided it for as long as possible, but now was the time. (Normally I would have done it but I was deep in the long, multi-step process for making the next course…)

COURSE 3: MARY CHUNG

Suanla Chou Shou (But Duck)

Duck wontons served in a sichaun sauce on a bed of refreshing bean sprouts

Ever since getting Andrea Nyugen’s book ASIAN DUMPLINGS, I’ve been making wontons and other dumplings frequently. Buy it. (At Bookstop or at Amazon) Every recipe in it has worked, and her website/YouTube channel has lots of tips. So almost every menu of ours has to have some kind of a bun or wonton or soup dumpling. So this was a natural, since Mary’s suanla chou shou is one of the most missed dishes in Cambridge history.

Mary’s first opened in 1981, then closed in 1989 or so when a medical testing company bought up some property in Central Square. Many many MIT alums decried the lack of “swans” (you have to say it with a Massachese accent) during the period when Mary Chung had no restaurant, but she re-opened in the 1990s, then retired at the end of 2022. I personally never liked most of the food there, but agree with the consensus that the dan dan noodles and suanla chou shou were the two best things on the menu. Suanla chou shou may be one of the most re-created dishes on the internet because so many fans of Mary’s have needed to feed their addiction.

Digging into the Mary’s lore online led me to a recipe from an earlier restaurant, Colleen’s Chinese Cuisine, which had originally introduced “swans”  to the area. Colleen taught Chinese cooking at MIT sometimes, and so her recipes are still floating around on the archives of rec.food and the like. Colleen’s recipes omitted some necessary ingredients, though, that you simply could not get in the 1970s and ‘80s (especially if you were a college student with no car), like chin kiang black vinegar and szechuan peppercorn.

Ultimately for the sauce I followed Kenji Lopez Alt’s recipe for the sauce from Serious Eats (https://www.seriouseats.com/sichuan-wonton-chili-oil-suanla-chaoshou-recipe#toc-making-the-sauce), except instead of toasting my own chili oil, I found it easier to adjust the heat level by taking some premade Lao Gan Ma Fried Chili in Oil (which is a different jar from their famous Chili Crisp) mixing it with sesame oil and letting it sit, and then using that.

I used the Colleen’s recipe for the wonton filling except I omitted the cabbage and egg, and replaced pork with duck (found in a archived thread from rec.food.restaurants). 

Filling

• 1 lb ground DUCK
• 3 Tbsp Soy Sauce
• 2 Tbsp Wine
• 2 Tbsp Oil
• 2 tsp Salt
• 1 tsp Sesame Oil
• 2 Tbsp chopped Scallion
• 1 tsp minced ginger
• Dash of White Pepper

Apparently the practice of serving the spicy wontons in chili oil on top of a pile of fresh bean sprouts was a Colleen’s invention, as it doesn’t seem to be done that way in other parts of the world, and now it’s a full-blown New England regional variation. In the various Mary Chung’s fan groups and Reddit threads, folks have reported finding “swans” served on bean sprouts in New Hampshire and Vermont as well.

Duck meat adds a level of depth to the filling flavor that pork often lacks, and home made wonton wrappers are much more delicious than the store-bought ones. It takes a pasta machine to do it right, but it was really worth it. This dish came out so good, I’m writing this post less than 24 hours later and I’m already craving it. I should have made more so we’d have leftovers. (We do have some leftover filling, but I need to make more skins… and of course we need more beansprouts. Talk about something that does NOT keep in the crisper…)

COURSE 4: NIGHT MARKET

Here come the Numb Nuts.

Palate Cleanser: After the spicy chili oil intensity of suanla chou shou, we served an ice cream palate cleanser: a scoop of pandan coconut-milk ice cream with accompanying numb nuts and fudge sauce, as a deconstructed sundae.

Thanks to Tse Wei (of Journeyman) who is getting ready to move out of town for a couple of years for a job, who asked if we’d hang on to his PacoJet ice cream machine while he’s gone, and we said yes, if we can pick it up ASAP? Because on Wednesday, our Whynter brand ice cream maker went kaput (for the second time in its life) and so this course was rescued by the Paco. (TseWei is also the one who pointed out which grocery stores in Malden were likely to have pandan leaves.)

Numb nuts, as mentioned before, were a bar snack. They are essentially candied peanuts with szechuan peppercorns and salt and cayenne. (I think at Night Market there might have been garlic, too?) I always thought they would be good with ice cream. Guess what, they are.

COURSE 5: CHAU CHOW

Chau Chow Beef Brisket Chow Fun (But Duck)

Home made chow fun noodles stir fried with sliced duck breast, onions, and beansprouts

The old-old Chau Chow restaurant stood on Beach Street from the 1980s (or even earlier?) until around 2004. As often befalls a restaurant when it takes over the space of a beloved institution, the next place failed (I don’t even remember what it was called). Gourmet Dumpling House was there from 2007-2023, and was the first place in Boston to be a soup dumpling destination, often with a line out the door. Now it’s the fast-casual offshoot of NYC’s Nan Xiang, cranking out XLB on disposable plates. (Tse Wei has an absolute excoriation of Nan Xiang Express in his Substack newsletter that is a must-read: https://letthemeatcake.substack.com/p/no-76-insufficiently-disposable)

Not to be confused with the Grand Chau Chow across the street, or Chau Chow City, the dim sum palace around the corner, the old “cash only” Chau Chow was a hole in the wall where the only “decoration” consisted of hand-written menu items on paper (in Chinese only) taped to the walls. It was also the place where we saw the most dine-and-dash attempts. I say “attempts” because they were not successful. I do not know how exactly, in the days before cell phones, Boston’s Chinatown restaurants communicated that a party had dashed, only that the offenders would quickly be apprehended and marched back to the restaurant by cleaver-toting cooks from nearby restaurants.

The offenders would typically then apologize profusely, explaining that they were too embarassed to admit they didn’t have enough cash, and on seeing the “cash only” sign, decided to chance sneaking out. If they were able to produce credit cards at that point, they would be marched over to Grand Chau Chow — same food with a slightly better décor — where they did take cards.

After the would-be thieves were gone, of course, the staff would be all smiles. Catching dashers was probably the most fun they ever had at work.

My favorite dish at the old Chau Chow (one that gets eaten a lot in Daron’s Guitar Chronicles) was a beef brisket chow foon that every time I ordered it, the waiters would double check that I was okay with how fatty it was. Thus it seemed a good candidate to recreate with duck. We couldn’t quite replicate the globs of gelatinous tendon that was usually in the Chau Chow dish, but by passing the duck through oil, we could give it a lovely velvet-soft texture and a beefy, almost livery, flavor (by liberal application of oyster sauce).

corwin’s wok technique has really leveled up over the years, and one of our dinner guests, Phil, machined a new built-in wok ring for us, which he brought with him and it was used during the cooking of this dish.

Pairing: Trimbach 2015 Gewurztraminer “Seigneurs de Ribeaupierre”

(There pretty much always has to be a gewurz on the Duck Day menu.)

COURSE 6: THE FOREST CAFE

Forest Cafe Tinga de Pollo (But Duck)

Confit duck “carnitas” in a tomato-chipotle sauce, served with a traditional slaw & bicolor tortillas

Our favorite watering hole in Cambridge for years and years was a three-generation family business which sadly closed after the 2008 economic crash. What you might not have known from the exterior of the Forest Cafe, which looked like any other family-owned dive bar in the area, was that the cook, an Irish guy named Jim, specialized in Yucatecan mexican cuisine. A different molé would appear every few days, and tinga de pollo was almost always on the menu. Many, many nights when we failed to make a dinner plan until 9:45 pm, we’d end up hurrying in to the Forest before the kitchen would close for whatever Jim had simmering on the stove.

What’s funny is we didn’t discover how great the Forest was until the middle of a snowstorm. In the 90s we didn’t eat (or drink) in bars because we didn’t smoke, but in 2003 Cambridge banned smoking citywide. On the weekend of the North American Blizzard of 2005 we were attending the Arisia Science Fiction Convention and got stuck at the Park Plaza Hotel due to the severity of the blizzard. When the travel ban was briefly lifted the next day, we got our car out of the garage and headed home before getting stuck at the hotel for another night.

At home we discovered 4-5 foot snowdrifts blocking our front door and nowhere to put our car. (We have no driveway.) We dug our way through to our shovels and were chipping away at the mountainous problem, when I threw my back out in one of those spine-tingling motions that sends shooting pain all the way down my legs and made me see stars. At that point corwin gave up, and ran down the street toward the sound of some snowblowers to beg for help. He handed the cash we had made on book sales at the convention to some guys who were clearing a driveway a few houses down, and they cheerfully came and blew clear a parking space for our car, and our walkways and stairs. “You’re lucky!” they told us. “We were about to quit for the night so we can catch the Pats game!”

Inside the house we discovered we had no power, so we decided, let’s walk to the nearest bar where they have Patriots football game on, and get some food. We made it through the snow to the The Forest without really knowing what to expect. Were we going to be welcome there? Was the food any good?

We really shouldn’t have worried, I guess. We got seats at the bar and within minutes we had been introduced to some of the regulars, who included the guy who used to write John F. Kennedy’s speeches, a composer of classical music, and a Smithsonian Institute astronomer who spent half of each year in Cambridge, half in Chile minding telescopes. The food was fantastic — a thick Mexican stew such as tinga de pollo is excellent on a winter night — and their bar featured a long list of tequilas and mezcals long before mezcal got hip. The astronomer knew his tequilas, and upon hearing of my back spasm, said “allow me to choose a tequila for you.”

Lo and behold, with five minutes my back pain was gone, and even more miraculous, the next day it was STILL gone. From that night on, The Forest became our regular watering hole, especially during baseball season, because Brian, the owner’s son who tended bar, and the other Brian, the other main bartender, would always have the game on. (Remember those were the very rudimentary days of streaming sports on the Internet and we did not have a TV or cable.) One night during the 2005 World Series, we stayed late into the night with Brian-1 watching the White Sox play an epic 14-inning game against the Astros. Since the game went on past not only the bar’s usual closing time, but the time they were legally allowed to be open, Brian just turned off all the lights and locked the door and the three of us sat there watching the whole thing.

After the Forest closed, the place that took over the space, the Rafiki Bistro, was not good despite their best intentions. Our experiences there included being served chicken wings that were still frozen inside and servers who didn’t know the menu. Rafiki didn’t even last two years. Giulia took over the space in 2012, and quickly became one of our favorite restaurants of all time, though nothing will ever quite replace the local watering hole spirit that was found at The Forest.

Pairing: A “margarita” (home made orange-lime soda with optional mezcal)

COURSE 7: Dessert

An artisanal “choco taco”

Vanilla ice cream, hazelnut cocoa cream, bittersweet chocolate shell, peanuts, in a sweet taco-shaped shell

I loved the Choco Taco. I loved the concept of it, and whenever I found it on sale at, say, a highway rest area, I would buy it. But Klondike, a subsidiary of Good Humor, discontinued the manufacturing of Choco Tacos in 2022, and I see people selling them on eBay for $500.

Invented in 1983 in Philadelphia by Alan Drazen, the Choco Taco quickly became a popular staple of ice cream trucks and gas station convenience stores. Klondike supposedly axed the product because of “a sharp increase in demand across its brands and to ensure the availability of the remainder of its products.” (Associated Press)

I opine that the truth is that a Choco Taco had a lower profit margin than those other products. A Choco Taco had essentially the same ingredients as a Drumstick, but was much bigger, for the same price. (If you haven’t had one, a Drumstick has a paltry amount of ice cream and is barely worth eating, especially in contrast to the Choco Taco’s former glory.)

To recreate the Choco Taco at home without a waffle cone maker, I turned to a recipe for making homemade ice cream cones in a pan (Tiffin Box on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylgNVeLNrNU) which is very similar to the recipe I had previously used for fortune cookies, using powdered sugar and egg whites:

• 3 tbsp melted butter
• 1/2 cup powder sugar
• 2 medium egg white
• 5 tbsp all-purpose flour
• optional: a few drops of vanilla extract

Because I knew I wanted to make these fairly small so that out guests weren’t getting overloaded, I made 15 taco shells from a recipe that said it would make 10 ice cream cones.

One of the questions when shaping these into taco shells was how exactly to get them to take shape. Like with fortune cookies you have to form the dough sheet once it has been cooked but is still hot and pliable, because as soon as it cools, it hardens. Turns out my metal cannoli forms (which are tubes) were perfect for the bending, but I needed something to hold the shells in place until they cooled and to keep them upright while being filled.

Turns out the perfect thing is that little plastic support doohickey with three legs that comes in the box whenever we get a pizza delivered from Joe’s.

Recently, Joe’s from Greenwich Village in New York City has opened an outpost in Harvard Square. They took over the space that had been shared by Momofuku Milk Bar and something called &Pizza (Ampersand Pizza? And Pizza? I never knew how to say it) &Pizza is a DC-based pizza chain that had coveted this high profile spot in the Square for a long time, tried to get the space in 2017 but it took until 2019 to finally get all the approvals necessary and open for business. (They’d brought in Milk Bar as a co-tenant to satisfy local opposition to “yet another (mediocre) pizza place in the Square.”) But they were only open about a year before the 2020 lockdowns happened.

And although other businesses in our neighborhood thrived on takeout business during lockdown, and you would think a pizza place naturally would… as a chain business not even based here, &Pizza could not apparently hire or retain enough workers to keep their operation running. Instead of thriving, they couldn’t compete with all the local restaurants who dove into take-out (and who cared about making sure their employees were taking care of…) and provided spotty hours and service. Even in 2021, when we were not under mandatory lockdown, but many many Cambridge residents were still relying heavily on takeout, &Pizza was dying and by spring 2022 it was dead. I can’t say I miss it because, after all, it was never anything more than yet another (mediocre) pizza place in the Square.

Joe’s, on the other hand, is a truly excellent pizza shop. The pizza is great, it’s always busy, and the guys in there making pizza always seem to be having a great time while they’re doing it. And the busier it is, the happier they seem to be.

If you’re not from New York, it’s difficult to explain why Boston pizza, which RESEMBLES New York pizza, is not, in fact, the same thing at all. New York pizza and New Haven (CT) a’pizza are very much the same, in fact, but somehow in the two-hour drive to the northeast, the necessary texture of the crust, the balance of cheese and sauce, and whatever it is that makes NY-NH pizza GOOD, is lost. Every time we order from Joe’s I am amazed all over again how it’s THE RIGHT STUFF. When you grow up in New York or New Jersey you take it for granted that that is what pizza is. Then you go anywhere else in the country and try the pizza and are inevitably disappointed because it just does not hit your senses the same way.

Probably whatever type of regional pizza you grew up with is the “right” pizza for you. I’m not saying New York pizza is better, just that for a New Yorker, any other pizza is a disappointment. (I’ve now lost count of the number of times in my books where some character laments mediocre pizza in Boston or elsewhere. Maybe now that Joe’s has healed my soul I can stop complaining…?)

Anyway, after decades without truly good pizza, Joe’s is here to save us. Which is good since we can no longer run over to the Forest Cafe at 9:45 pm on a weeknight when we have failed to make dinner.

All of that was of course an aside to the fact that I’ve been collecting the little pizza-box-anti-collapse doohickeys for the past year, and while making the taco shells, they turned out to be the perfect thing to hold them in place if you turn them upside down.

In the bottom of each shell I spread a bit of organic hazelnut cocoa spread (like Nutella, but one of the hoity toity organic brands), then carefully packed in vanilla ice cream. Then I tempered a bittersweet chocolate sauce to top it with, sprinkled with crushed roasted peanuts before the chocolate could harden. To serve it, I drizzled each taco with a salted caramel sauce, and served it with some extra caramel and fudge sauce on the plate.

A sweet end to a delicious meal, in a year where we have a lot to be thankful for, especially our friends and family, and the people who have worked so hard to keep us fed and happy all these years.

Additional thanks to Claudia and Regis for photos of the dishes I forgot to take pictures of because I was too busy trying to get them onto the table!

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