After a whole week of ridiculous and ridiculously expensive eating, I insisted we tap the brakes. Tom was forced to eat some leftovers. But these were no ordinary leftovers. A two bone lamb chop leftover from Galatoire’s on Father’s Day remained in the refrigerator while we continued our eating marathon. I offered those chops today before it met the same fate as the gorgeous oyster loaf I made him last week. Those beautiful oysters went into the trash, and that is saying something for me.
ML has been seeing a little place called Tessier Gourmet on Instagram and has become curious about it. We pass it every time we are on Highway 21, and when it first showed up we gave it no chance of being there six months later. I was really surprised to see another location last week in Folsom when we drove up to look for the donut shop.
It turns out that the place in Folsom is the flagship and the one on Highway 21 is a second location. We won’t worry about it anymore.
I didn’t find this out until I spoke to the young man at the counter. Tom and I went in there to pick up dinner for him, since everything in the house was over the hill. It was the perfect answer to the food dilemma for the evening.
Tessier Gourmet is a funny little place of prepared foods that are frozen. Stacks of them. Everything from tomato basil soup to white beans and zucchini soup and artichoke and garbanzo bean salad, beef tamales, quiche, chicken parm, lasagna, chicken enchiladas, braised brisket, and on and on.
If your mom spent all her time in the kitchen it would be this. As it turns out, the mom in the kitchen is the young man’s mother, Pam Tessier, who started the business in Folsom 6 years ago. After success at the farmer’s market the Folsom location opened. And ML and I were very wrong about the little place on Highway 21. It’s been there three years.
It’s a little expensive. We got a small quiche, the smallest size chicken enchiladas, a small chicken parm, and a small artichoke and garbanzo bean salad. It was $33.
I took a few bites of the artichoke salad which didn’t look all that great but tasted really good. Sort of a chunky hummus with a good kick to it. The rest of the order went into the oven. These little dishes were packed so densely they were heavy. It’s a good thing they weren’t priced by weight.
Because they were so dense it took a while for them to heat up. The quiche was done first, and although it looked like a sunken in and shriveled thing, the taste was really good, and the texture even better. It had some spinach in it and the eggs were really fluffy but not so much so that there was not much to it. The crust was flaky and this was just what you’d want in a quiche.
The chicken enchiladas were bubbling next, and the black beans mixed with the cheese and shredded chicken in a way that made it a creamy and hearty mouthful of flavor. I haven’t had better chicken enchiladas. After we ate some of this, the chicken parm was ready. This was a fresh and very flavorful sauce with shredded mozzarella on top but there wasn’t a lot of cheese. It didn’t overshadow any of it. The sauce was plentiful and flavorful. It was the main attention grabber. Very good. Chunks of chicken didn’t seem to be breaded and fried, and that was surprising but not at all disappointing. This was a great taste.
Everything at Tessier Gourmet is made in a big commercial kitchen in Folsom now. The product line is definitely sizable enough. They were out of enough things, like slices of a decadent-looking chocolate buttermilk pie, that it seems it's all going very well for them. ML and I won’t have to worry about them anymore. Instead of just wondering how long they’ll be there, we’ll stop in now and get something new to try.
