This year's contribution to our annual Valentine's Day meal is by far the fanciest, most decadent, and most gorgeous addition to the recipe family. Previous years brought us the good ol'
surf n turf and the unique
duck pizza. This year I copied a recipe from Top Chef, pretty much the only reality show I can stomach. For those of you who have not tried foie gras, it is fatty duck liver that melts in your mouth in buttery savory sweet amazingness. It's so decadent that you can't eat very much at once, which is good because it's freakin expensive. $28 at Wegman's for ~5 oz.
There are several components to this dish: a french toast-like bread called pain perdu, apple preserves, spiced pecans, maple foam, and of course the scallops and foie gras. You can make the preserves and pecans ahead of time, but the rest needs to come together simultaneously so unless you are a Top Chef it would be good to have a sous chef slash willing husband available.
I don't have any fancy equipment to make the maple foam, so I used my immersion blender and scooped the foam off the top, immediately before serving so it would hold. It's not as thick as a foam you'd see in a Colicchio restaurant, but it tastes the same.
We meant to have this as an appetizer (2 each), with a seared duck breast salad as an entree, but we were too full to make the duck. Full disclosure: we also had a pre-appetizer of cheese.
I halved the recipe for the apple preserves (already halved below), but you could probably also 1/2 the pecan and foam recipes as well. We have leftover pecans which is actually not a bad thing, but did throw out a lot of foam.
