Casual Dinner Party
Photo by Melissa Schneider.
After an eight-month entertaining hiatus, we've gone crazy. A mere week after Clotilde's visit pushed us, blinking after a long slumber, into the sunlight of dinner parties, we had a second feast. We cautioned our friends that it was a casual night: appetizer, opener, main, cheese, and dessert. We even encouraged them to bring wine to share; they went overboard with generosity.
Five courses may not sound like a casual night, but it's easy. Buy the charcuterie for the appetizer platter, serve the cheese on a cheese board, and make a lot of the food in advance.
The Food
Appetizer: Fatted Calf mortadella and rabbit rillettes, olives, fried lemon slices, and duck ham.
The homemade duck ham and olives were already in the refrigerator, so all I had to do to finish was fry the thin lemon slices, which I dredged in flour and buttermilk to emulate a Zuni favorite.
Opener: Greens with pitted cherries, red wine vinaigrette, salt-roasted almonds, and warm goat cheese
This salad derailed me a bit; it took a while to get it out to the table, despite my well-prepared list of to-do items. I would have let everyone serve themselves from a big bowl, but the small rounds of warm goat cheese forced me to plate in the kitchen.
Main: Duck confit with asparagus, roasted potatoes, and roasted onions.
"Duck confit is the ultimate fast food," says Jeremiah Tower in Jeremiah Tower Cooks. Once it's made, you need only reheat it after you pull it from the fat.
Cheese: Beemster, Brie, Gabietou
When we got to the front of the line at the Cheese Board, I said to the cheesemonger, "What are you interested in right now?" I never would have thought to pick a Brie, but he reminded me how good they can be. Ours was from Le Chatelain, whom I normally think of as a Camembert producer. The Beemster is a Dutch cheese with the color of Mimolette, the grittiness of Parmiggiano, and the consistency of Cheddar. The Gabietou was a flavorful Spanish cheese made from a mix of sheep and cow milks.
Dessert: Hot fudge sundaes, with chocolate chip and roasted banana ice creams.
Melissa suggested ice cream, and I extrapolated to hot fudge sundaes. The hot fudge sauce in The Perfect Scoop rocks. I also like David's idea to use stracciatella, an Italian technique where you get "chips" by drizzling melted chocolate in a thin stream into the ice cream as the machine finishes churning it. No more handmade chocolate chips for me.
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