Entertaining Again
Two months ago and more, we held our last dinner party before the wedding. But even before we left, we were planning more. I've been itching to entertain, and I eagerly looked forward to last night's event. Not only did we get to entertain, but we got to show off all our wedding presents: dishes, crystal, vases, our copper champagne bucket, we pulled out all the stops.
Perhaps I was too eager. Melissa suggested early on that I was being overambitious, especially given the fact that I was away from home most of Saturday (a soufflé class, about which more soon), but I tried. In the end, though, she was right. I had to change a number of plans midway through the day, and only about 15 minutes before our guests arrived I began to feel under control of things.
Still, I think I made a decent recovery. Below is the menu. For those who enjoyed pictures from my last party in February, a word of advice: if you are going to drop your brand-new digital camera, I would avoid doing it on the stone floor of a chateau in the Loire. Especially if the zoom is all the way out. So now all the pictures come out a little blurry, and we haven't had it fixed yet. Fear not, though! It will hopefully be ready by our next dinner party. We'll have to go back to describing platings in the interim.
Despite the rest of my insanity, I managed to pick a fairly simple antipasti platter (this was because I was planning 3 amuse-bouches). Acme bread, prosciutto salami, and olives. For dipping the bread, we used some of the olive oil we brought back from the Piedmont, an artisanal producer associated with Cascina dell Cornale (again, more about that later).
The mussel idea was adapted from Mediterranean Street Food, a book which piqued my interest when I read the Cook's Illustrated review of it: every person in their test kitchen who evaluated it went and bought their own copy. This is the first item I've tried out of it (that whole wedding thing), but the recipes all sound delicious. To do the stuffed mussels, you make a rice seasoned with onions, tomato paste, red pepper flakes and dried cranberries (this was my adaptation, so the list of ingredients is fairly different from hers, but I kept the spirit the same). You pry open the mussels with an oyster knife, spread their shells apart, stuff 'em with rice and then set them in a pot with a weight on top to keep them closed shut. Then steam as you would for moules marinieres (a little longer though). Très simple.
Our champagne was one of our last bottles from the wedding: our caterer poured freely. It's a good Champagne, estate bottled (unlike most Champagnes), and a reasonable price too.
So I had this great idea for doing a soufflé amuse-bouche. A simple cheese soufflé served in a tiny ramekin. After all, I had this whole soufflé class the day before, right? And then for my opener I was going to do ravioli with an asparagus purée on top and some sort of cheesy filling.
This was one of the areas where I overextended myself. I had already made the filling and the purée, and was making the pasta when I realized that I wouldn't have enough. By a long shot. And I had no time to make more.
So I changed tactics. I decided that our opener would be a soufflé flavored with the filling I had made for the ravioli, and I'd skip doing it as an amuse. The purée? Check back on Eating Well Cheaply at some point in the future.
The soufflé came out really nicely. One of our guests asked if I had been making a lot of soufflés, and I had to be honest and say it was the fourth soufflé I had made that weekend. I used real Alsatian Munster (this is not the bland flavorless stuff you get on your deli sandwiches; this is the real thing and it's a potent cheese), and Ricotta to stiffen it up a bit. I tossed in some conserved lemon to give it a little burst of contrasting flavor.
The wine is also leftover from our wedding. Our guests cleaned us out on the reds and the champagne, but we have plenty of the white. Which is just fine with us.
The style of wine was decided long before the food for this particular dinner: both Tyler and Michelle and Lisa and Josh were kind enough to give us Riedel Pinot Noir glasses, so we had to serve some. Unfortunately, I don't know a lot about Pinot Noir, but Wine Spectator had a review of Oregonian Pinot Noirs recently, so I picked one off their list. (long-time readers will know that I don't take tasting notes during dinner parties, so you must buy your own bottle if you want to know what it tasted like; it was good)
The pork roast was fairly simple, and the sauce was really good. I used a combination of chicken stock and the liquid leftover from rehydrating some porcini to deglaze the roasting pan and make my sauce. I garnished the roast with carrots cut "Parisienne" style, which is to say scooped into little balls with a teensy melon baller, and julienned fennel. Not exactly a seasonal dish, but it was nonetheless quite good.
Again, I had a vision. Nice patties of goat cheese sandwiched between beet tuiles to make a little Napoleon. Then I got to the cheese store, and the woman behind the counter suggested I try some of their Brie de Meaux. I love Brie de Meaux, enough that I'm willing to deal with the fact that we can't get the unpasteurized version here. And in the same way that authentic Alsatian Munster is nothing like the flabby cheese you put on your sandwich, authentic Brie de Meaux is unlike the flavorless impostors you find in most American markets.
The other cheese was one of the cheeses we got as part of our cheese club membership. Yes, you read that right. Melissa's aunts were kind enough to give us a membership to the Tomales Bay Foods cheese club, and our first shipment (ironically enough, as we had just come back there) was Italian cheeses. Strachitund (and this comes from Slow Food's Italian Cheese book) is made similarly to Taleggio, but is allowed to develop mold to make a blue cheese.
The verjus curd was an idea I had (Art Culinaire had a whole section on verjus which got me thinking) and wanted to try out. I made it just like lemon curd, but with verjus. I didn't have anywhere else to serve it, so I served a dollop with the cheese course. Cause nothing counters cheese like eggs. But seriously, the acidity was nice with the cheese and the flavor was quite good.
The wine was inspired by the goat cheese I had planned on serving, traditional Sauvignon Blanc being a classic partner to goat cheese. But I decided it would work well for our other cheeses (I am one of those ever-growing number of heretics who find white wine generally a better pairing with all but the firmer cheeses).
Again you can thank Art Culinaire for the inspiration here. Their pages are flush with "this three ways" or "that tasting", dishes which encompass different preparations of the same ingredient.
I served a strawberry sorbet (in a gorgeous crystal bowl) which I garnished with honey-caramel ribbons, raw (fanned, of course) strawberries with 25-year-old aceto balsamico tradizionale, and a dense gingerbread topped wth a strawberry-rhubarb compote (both of which I served warm). It was a standout dish, though the soufflé came out well enough to be a contender for most memorable dish of the evening. The gingerbread came from In the Sweet Kitchen, one of my favorite dessert cookbooks: at something like 780 pages long, the recipes don't start until page 400 or so. The rest is just ingredients.
I've touted Vin de Glaciere before. It's not as spectacular as the ice wine it emulates, but it's quite a good dessert wine, and very reasonably priced.
One of my failings was that we did not have a mignardise (I bought the chocolate for truffles), but we did finish the evening with a digestif, high-end Muscat grappa from St' George's Spirits. Even a tiny sip and my throat was burning. It's potent stuff.
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