[Sca-cooks] pre-Columbian foods

[Tara Sersen Boroson]

Funny this topic should come up :)  In two weeks I'm doing a supper club 
meal, and I'm focusing on New World ingredients.  I'm not being any more 
geographically specific than that, though it would be really neat to try 
a Pennsylvania-area specific meal sometime...  Anyway, here's my 
tentative menu:

H'or Douvres:   Pumpkin and goat cheese tarts with caramelized onions
                        Cheese platter with dried cranberries, 
blueberries, pecans, and amaranth crackers
First course:      Polenta with sun dried tomato tapenade
Second course:  Senegalese peanut stew
Third course:     Avocado and watercress salad
Fourth course:   Tamarind and seed crusted turkey leg
                         Curried sweet potato pancakes with creme fraiche
Fifth course:      Cranberry sorbet
Sixth course:      Bison steak au poivre with red wine shallot marmalade
                          Roasted acorn squash with applesauce
Seventh course:  Maple allspice creme brulee
                          Habanero pepper chocolate truffles

I'm considering serving historically accurate hot chocolate in lieu of 
the truffles, but the truffles are always such a hit...  Three people 
have significant sensitivities to peppers, which is why they're not 
figured prominantly. 

I still have to, well, make up a few of the recipes ;)  So, I guess the 
folks at my pottery classes will be my guinea pigs.  They don't usually 
complain!

Does anybody have experience with using crystallized maple sugar instead 
of regular sugar for topping creme brulee?  Is there anything different 
about it?

-Magdalena vander Brugghe

-- 
Tara Sersen Boroson

You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it for himself. - Galileo Galilei