Tuna Tartare and Lobster Tail

And to finish the weekend off, two seafood plates - one is from a cookbook from Melisse restaurant, In Pursuit Of Excellence - ahi tuna tartare (although I'm not sure the tuna I have is ahi tuna), and then a very simple lobster tail, just because we happened to pick it up in the grocery store today.

First up, an "official" recipe from the book.

The recipes in the book are absolutely delicious, but I wouldn't consider them difficult. The only difficulty is getting the ingredients, but if you have the right ones on hand, the recipes themselves are just regular cooking, no magic needed. One of the more-doable recipes that caught my eye was tuna tartare. There are four components to the dish - tuna tartare, pickled cucumbers, avocado mousse and vinaigrette.

For tuna tartare, dice tuna (I should have diced mine more fine than I did), finely dice shallot and chives.

Combine the three in the bowl with olive oil and toss thoroughly.

For pickled cucumbers, peel and dice a cucumber.

Boil a 1:1:1 of water, rice vinegar and sugar.

Add cucumbers, remove from heat, and let cool.

For avocado mousseline, clean an avocado (recipe called for one and I started with one, but I ended up adding one more, probably just because I love pure avocado taste so much). Scoop out the flesh.

Juice half a lime.

Using a blender, puree avocados, lime juice, creme fraiche and salt and pepper to taste.

For vinaigrette, recipe asks to make simple syrup, but I'm going with using a spoon of pickling liquid I used for cucumbers. Recipe also calls for using yuzu juice, which I don't have, so I am substituting a different citrus juice instead - meyer lemon.

Add grapeseed and olive oils, salt and pepper to taste and whisk.

To serve, first arrange the cucumbers, then the tuna, top with avocado mousse. Spoon vinaigrette around. I do not have round mold for a more fancy presentation in the book, and my cookie cutters just aren't big enough. So I went with just piling one thing on another. And I decorated the dish with a small meyer lemon twist. I find that with meyer lemons, the peel is much better tasting than the fruit itself, and that little twist actually added some good flavor to the dish.

This is actually quite a simple dish, but oh! so delicious! Surely we'll be making this again.

And to follow, an extremely simple lobster tail, avocado and citrus. To cook lobster tails, bring lightly salter water to boil, add the tails, and let them cook for a few minutes.

When tails are nice and bright red and cooked, remove from heat and drop into an ice bath.

When cool enough to handle, remove the meat from the tail. Slice. Serve with avocado puree and a few slices of citrus - grapefruit is actually perfect here, but I didn't have any. If you do, lobster or king crab + avocado + pink grapefruit is a killer flavor combination. Try it! You will see. Here, I added a slice of meyer lemon to the plate to still add a dash of the citrus flavor to the dish.