Cooking

Casual Dinner Parties? From us?

You all know about my dinner parties by now. Five, six, and once ten, courses, wines paired to the course as best as I'm able. Days of work.

So when Melissa suggested we have our friends Jean and Chris over last week-end (on Saturday and Sunday respectively), I wondered how I could do it. I had big events going on on both days, about which more to come soon. That would leave precious little time to assemble dinner.

"Maybe we can make them more casual dinners. They can bring some dish, and you can just do a couple courses." A casual dinner party. Allowing other people to contribute. Hmm. That seemed novel.

Our first casual dinner party was with our friend Jean. She and Melissa had spent the day together, and Melissa thought it would be a nice end to the day for all of us to have dinner together. I was in Redwood City for a big wine tasting, so had to keep things somewhat simple.

I liked this layout quite a bit.

When Jean and Melissa arrived, I had a simple appetizer plate ready. Thin slices of prosciutto salami, and two different kinds of olives (a more casual dinner party meant that it was easier to take pictures, so you get shots of all the dishes for this one). While they nibbled on these treats, I started assembling dinner. We poured some Rock River Merlot to start. I mentioned before that our wine club from the Ferry Building Wine Merchant hinted that this was a second label from a very well-known producer. Not knowing (or caring) much about Napa wineries, we just enjoy the flavor.

Winter Caprese Salad

I had been thinking about caprese salad when planning this dinner. You may not know the term, but you've undoubtedly had the dish: slices of succulent tomato topped with rounds of fresh mozzarella and basil. It's a good dish, but very seasonal; if you can't find good tomatoes, in my opinion, it's not worth making it. So I decided to do a winter version. I roasted gold and red small beets (not quite baby but still smaller than average), sliced them into rounds, drizzled them with walnut oil and topped them with slices of goat cheese (this from Redwood Hill Farms). I sprinkled tarragon over this and garnished with toasted walnuts. All very classic pairings of flavors, and they worked well together. Jean, not a big beet fan, enjoyed hers quite a bit, at least enough to clean her plate, which I figure is always a good sign. If I were doing it again, I'd probably use a more crumbly goat cheese. I wanted the stripes of color from the beets to be more visible.

Chicken and Rice (and, uh, some duck fat)

For the entree, I did a simple roast chicken. I had brined the chicken that morning, and started roasting it when Jean arrived. On the side, I served wild rice tossed with hazelnuts and celery root cut very small and fried in duck fat. I also served winesap apples sautéed in duck fat. I just started discovering the joys of cooking with duck fat, so it shows up a lot these days. For the sauce, I made a chicken stock with the back of the chicken (which I had butterflied) and the neck (from the bag of goodies inside the bird), which used yet more chicken stock as part of the base. Once it was made, I reduced it A LOT, and added some Frangelico, which I cooked off just a little.

By now we had switched to the Ridge Sonoma Station Zinfandel, a favorite wine at our dinners. It worked nicely with the chicken

Jean's Dessert. Ice cream and cookies. Does one really need to say more than that?

For dessert, Jean made molasses "lumberjack" cookies, which she served atop a bowl of Haagen-Dazs Vanilla Swiss Almond ice cream. She garnished the dish with finely chopped crystallized ginger, which mirrored the ginger in the cookies. And since she cooked the cookies here, they were nice and warm and soft.

I had been at the wine tasting earlier, which was a big tasting of German and Austrian wines. My favorite wine of the show was a Schereube Auslese from Weingut Ed. Weegmüller. Schereube is one of Germany's fine wine grapes, a cross between Riesling and sylvaner. And Auslesen are funny wines. I love them dearly, but they're a little too sweet to accompany the cheese course and often not sweet enough to go with dessert. But when Melissa mentioned Jean's plans for a dessert to me, I thought it would go quite well. It handled itself nicely, its pitch-perfect balance of sugar and acidity staying fairly true through the dessert. The fragrant spiciness of its aroma was a bit swallowed up by the ginger in the dessert, but not too badly. I don't know that I'll pair it with dessert again, though. Maybe with a foie gras course.

So not too bad for a casual dinner party. It was, I have to admit, nice to not have my entire day consumed by prep work for the dinner. I love big dinner parties, but this was a nice compromise solution.

And the next night we had our friend Chris over for yet another casual dinner party. I'll write that one up in the next couple days.

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