Cooking for Company is what we do at Frog. We are happy to share our recipes, resources and entertaining tips and ideas.
Spring Lunch at Home
 Here’s how things sometimes work. A lunch at Moritmoto and delicious scallops dressed with a sweet-sesame dressing. It wasn’t research, but a lunch to celebrate a friend’s birthday so the taste passed but the memory lingered. A few days later, the May issue of Martha Stewart Living arrives and a recipe for Matsuhisa dressing from Nobu Matsuhisa. I read the ingredients, remembered that Moritmoto worked with Nobu and eureka, this must be the dressing. I asked the kitchen to test the recipe and sure enough, the lingering memory. We found the dressing a little too thick so we added back some of the rendered liquid from the onions, but it seemed like we “discovered” a wonderful new dressing – adapted and renamed Sweet Onion Sesame Dressing.
A week later, an unusual mid-week day off and company for lunch. The shitakes at Whole Foods looked good and one thing lead to another. The result was another variation on the dressing using less sesame oil than called for and some aged balsamic vinegar.
Roasted shitakes over soba noodles with sweet-onion vinaigrette
This is a little recipe sketch. It provides a general guideline rather than a formal, tested recipe. The quantities are based on recollection and are approximate so use your judgement. You need to start the dressing the day (or night) before you plan to serve it.
Soba are a common Japanese noodle made from buckwheat flour. They are a typically a “cold weather” noodle as they have a hearty quality and Japanese are very attuned to matching ingredients and seasons. In this case, the soba noodles had the needed backbone to stand up to the strong dressing and worked visually with the roasted shitakes.
Ingredients:
Shitake mushrooms – about 10
Garlic – about 2 Tb
Shallots – about 1 Tb
Ginger – about 1/2 tsp
Soba noodles – about 4 oz
Sweet onion – about 1/2 – 2/3 cup very finely diced
Soy – about 3 Tb
Rice vinegar – about 2 Tb
Aged balsamic vinegar – about 2 Tb
Sesame oil – abou1/2 Tb
Olive oil – about 1 Tb
Sea salt – to taste (If not sea salt, then kosher salt. Last resort, common table salt.)
Fresh ground pepper from pepper mill – to taste
Scallions – finely diced and held in some ice water
Serves 2
Shitakes
Trim stems from shitakes and thinly slice the caps – not paper thin, but thin. About 1/16th of an inch. Toss the sliced shitakes in good olive oil and a healthy amount of chopped garlic. Roast shitakes on parchment paper lined cookie sheet at 400 degrees for about 10 – 15 minutes until the start to brown and get a little crisp. (The parchment paper helps the mushrooms brown.)
Soba noodles
Cook soba noodles in plenty of water. Test frequently starting just before you think they are done. You want to catch them when they no longer have a raw quality, but before they turn too soft. Drain and cool immediately under cold water. Set aside.
Sweet onion dressing
Place the finely diced onion in a fine strainer, cover and refrigerate over night. Then, combine the onion with the soy, rice and balsamic vinegars, sesame and olive oils, salt and pepper. Add back some of the rendered onion juice if you would like a thinner dressing.
To serve
Toss the soba noodles in the dressing and place in a deep bowl. Top with roasted shitakes taking care to make a nice tall mound. Make sure you scape off and include any roasted garlic stuck to the parchment. Drain the scallions from the iced water and top the shitakes.
This was the lunch’s first course. It was followed by pan-seared striped bass dusted with wild Italian fennel pollen (see Seasonal Ingredients below), served on top of an artichoke bottom placed in the center of an over-sized plate and surrounded by blanched fava beans, yellow wax beans cut on a bias into small pieces, sweet corn kernels scraped from the cob with the scrapings and a blood orange vinaigrette.
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Frog Commissary Cookbook
 The Frog Commissary Cookbook, first published in 1985, is the highest selling cookbook in the history of the region with more than 100,000 copies in print. After about a one-year hiatus, The Frog Commissary Cookbook is now available in area bookstores and through www.amazon.com.
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