Last night I had two couples to dinner who are going to be helping me with a project in a few weeks, and this was my way of thanking them in advance as well as discussing my ideas about how best to get the job done. The menu was a small plates progression of four courses of which the first was white asparagus spears with scallop ceviche. Apparently, my style of cooking and choices of ingredients is vastly different from their normal experience, and the ladies were atwitter as I set about creating the plates with the lion's share of their 'interest' being those scallops. The asparagus had been dressed with lime juice and white truffle oil, and the scallops had both but also a few drops of sesame oil, black sesame seed and slivered green onions. That lime juice 'cooks' seafood with acidity and not heat was obviously of great concern--one of ladies actually knew about ceviche but hadn't eaten it while the other had never heard the word. Neither eats sushi. Neither, I presume, did their husbands--these are both long and successful marriages, the kind where by this time you like or don't like all the same things.
Bravely though, neither admitted any of that until after dinner. Because both had separately taken one look at what I was preparing and immediately began trying to talk themselves into eating one bite before politely pushing the scallops away as they knew they would have to do. For different reasons, both hated scallops and weren't buying this 'cooking with acid' thing one little bit.
Well, they LOVED it. Both of them. And they couldn't get over it! It was just about all they talked about through the rest of the meal when they weren't asking suspicious questions like "I'll bet you don't buy Velveeta, do you?"
