In the past I've done things inspired by movies for diners seriously into film. Favorite ever was a group dish of fifty poached quail eggs with bacon, brunoise and a dab of hollandaise. No man can eat fifty eggs Benedict!
Tonight was the first game inspired dish I ever made though, and it was based on Eversion. It's a soup/stew served in a deep, narrow dish, so each element is covered by the one above it. At the top, boiled peas and glazed carrots. Very familiar. Then you get into broth, a perfectly safe beef consomme. Roasted shallots with a hint of star anise (aside from being tasty, it enhances meat flavors), then under that, braised beef heart. Then a wide thin piece of pasta, and under that, like a kind of half-ravioli, sealed off from the broth, is an organrific filling. Heart, kidney, lots of pepper, brown butter. On the very bottom, snails in port sauce. It gets weirder the deeper you go down!
And the best part: disturbing each element causes something new to happen to the broth, changing and thickening it. The glaze on the carrots and shallots, the strong flavor of the heart, the ravioli turns it into a thick stew, and the port sauce from the snails turns it all dark red and gory.
I wish, I wish, I wish octopus worked with the other components so I could have the end of the dish be really, truly eversion-y, maybe move the red up into the ravioli in the form of some blood and make the sauce for the octopus ink-based, but it's already pretty busy and I just don't think I'd be able to get it to work. Something this goofy has to be a great dish on top of all the cuteness, or I'm just being an asshole to the people eating it.
Anyway. EVERSION: THE FOOD! Shoulda followed it with an IWBTG dessert course. Next time.
