A Diminutive Dinner Party

We have begun to entertain again.

Not, I should add, in earnest. We are rusty at the dinner party game, and so we are swinging our foot along the surface of the water, pushing wavelets about before we jump in.

But nonetheless, some people other than us have sat at our dining room table. Some people other than us have eaten more than a course or two at that table. Some people other than us have sipped our wine.

The other night, we had some friends over. One was celebrating a birthday — like me, she is on some repeat of her 29th birthday — and the others were there to wish her well and catch up. I greeted everyone with a platter of salt-roasted chestnuts, radishes, and balsamic-roasted figs to nibble on while we poured glasses of Champagne.

Regular readers may be about to call me out. I recently claimed that I only peel chestnuts once a year. That’s true, but I have no problem letting my guests peel some, which is the presentation suggested in the original recipe. As it happens, these chestnuts peeled more easily than my tear-wrenching batch, but they still engaged our guests. I like a tactile appetizer platter. There is something immediately leveling and companionable about eating from a common plate, even when the guests are already good friends.

While our guests snacked, I plated a cauliflower panna cotta (mostly the recipe from The French Laundry Cookbook) with a spoonful of gremolata on top and a green salad on the side. I paired it with a 2002 Sherwood House Chardonnay from Long Island because I wanted a wine that was somewhat creamy and weighty with age for the panna cotta but also acidic enough for the salad dressing and gremolata.

Our main course — already we have arrived at the entrée, so you can tell this was casual — was a roast leg of lamb on a rosemary risotto garnished with small dice of root vegetables that had been blanched, shocked, and reheated in duck fat. I pulled a 2002 Ceja Cabernet Sauvignon, a rich, robust wine capable of standing up to the red-rare lamb, from our downstairs rack.

The course I fretted over the most, however, was dessert. Yes, you’re shocked: There was no cheese course. As I said, we are still regaining our stride. I called my dessert “Taste of December.” Eggnog ice cream garnished with nutmeg, pomegranate sorbet topped with ruby-red pomegranate seeds, and spiced cider sorbet, garnished with an apple slice. All served in tuile cups. I was eager to try the freeform sorbet recipes suggested by Harold McGee's The Curious Cook, a recent discovery at a local used book store. He offers proportions for scoopable sorbets of many kinds in tables that promise the ability to create wildly and still score. My first attempt was not exactly what I wanted: Scoopable, yes, but unevenly so, so I couldn’t make perfect little balls. Perhaps some alcohol would have done the trick. I didn’t serve a dessert wine because I feel that frozen desserts blunt the palate and remove the pleasure that a dessert wine can afford.

Our Last Dinner Party

We hosted our last dinner party one week ago.

No, not really. But it was the last dinner party we’re likely to have in our apartment. Sniff. It’s held a fair number of parties, and it’s a nice space — the dining room is gigantic for an apartment — but I’m looking forward to smoking cuts of meat on the back steps, plucking preserves from the basement, and serving food fresh from my garden.

You might imagine that we would do a blow-out farewell in honor of our current space, but I decided to keep it simple.

Appetizers and Amuse
Just before our guests arrived, I put out an appetizer platter: olives; salumi; homemade pickled red onions; and layered strips of zucchini, carrot, and bell pepper that I marinated overnight in oil and herbs. I poured a nice Prosecco — I always like to greet people with sparkling wine — and we dug in.

After I read Harold McGee’s article about gelatin filtration, I decided to try a butternut squash consomme as an amuse-bouche for this party. I steamed the quartered squash until fork-tender — about 20 minutes — over a simple stock of squash pulp, butter, and seeds, and then I used that liquid to purée the soft, orange flesh. I added water until the soup had a thin consistency and then one package of gelatin for the six cups of soup. I froze it overnight and thawed it for a week in the refrigerator in a sieve. The liquid in the soup seeped through the molecular net and dripped into the bowl below. The result was decidedly strange: An almost clear, light yellow liquid that tasted like pure butternut squash. I made a sage gelée with the intent of plopping tiny balls of it into the consomme, which I served in a small glass, but the jelly was too sticky. Melissa came up with the brilliant idea of “salting” the glasses with the sage jelly by dipping the rim into a bowl of jelly. This sticky rim added just a hint of sage to each sip of squash essence.

As an aside, I tried making fruit leather from the quivering squash mass that remained after the filtration, but I didn’t spread it thinly enough in the dehyrdator. Fruit leather remains an ongoing experiment.

Opener: Fall Salad With Marrow Dumpling
I had a hard time deciding on an opener. I auditioned a tongue and tail terrine from The River Cottage Meat Book, but I decided against it. It was good, but it didn’t seem like a natural step in the dinner. Then I saw a dish in Art Culinaire that featured fried marrow dumplings, quail eggs, caviar, and lobster glaze. I played around with that concept, but I couldn’t find an adaptation that worked for me. The morning of the party, I finally concocted a simple salad: Three leaves of Belgian endive arranged in a Mercedes-Benz symbol and filled with roasted grapes. In one corner, I piled sautéed fennel and bacon; in the other two I drizzled balsamic vinegar. I placed a fried marrow dumpling (scoop marrow, season, refrigerate, cover with egg and bread crumbs, and deep fry) at the center of the plate. I poured a François Pinon Vouvray to accompany the salad, trusting in its acidity to counteract the rich marrow.

Main: Slow-roasted Pork Shoulder With Brussels Sprouts
This wasn’t the prettiest dish I’ve ever plated, but even my talkative internal critic agreed that these slabs of pork, which I rubbed with salt and oregano and slow-roasted at 250° for two hours, were juicy and flavorful. I de-leafed Brussels sprouts and sautéed the greens in duck fat before braising them, and I dressed the meat with a brown butter sauce (which caused a stir in the dining room when it foamed violently after I added vinegar to the hot fat). I served Cantillon’s Rosé de Gambrinus, a raspberry-infused lambic beer, which I joked was a regional pairing: Cantillon is based in Brussels.

Cheese: Montgomery Cheddar
Given that Eat Local queen Jen Maiser was one of our guests, I joked that I tried to source ingredients from as far away as possible, but I only picked up the Montgomery Cheddar, a true English farmhouse cheese, because my cheese shop was out of the much more local Fiscalini bandage-wrapped cheddar. I served a dry Lustau oloroso sherry to complement the rich cheese.

Dessert: Pomegranate Sorbet With Pistachio Tuiles
Since I like to make frozen desserts early in the morning of a dinner party, you can imagine my frustration when I realized the night before that I hadn’t bought enough pomegranates. I had enough time to assemble the sorbet, but the delay stressed me out.

For once, I had success using the whack-with-a-wooden-spoon technique for extracting the blood-red seeds from the halved fruit, and I used a food mill to extract the juice from the ruby drops. I combined the tart liquid with sugar, strained fig jam, vodka, and a bit of red wine vinegar to get the taste right. But even a deep red sorbet isn’t very eye-catching when served naked, so I made lacy pistachio tuiles that I could pose like a sail in the sorbet. A number of my recent dishes have combined red and green in unexpected ways: Maybe all the Christmas decorations in stores have influenced me.

Mignardise: Candied Buddha’s Hand And Pine Nut Brittle
I’ve already written about the pine nut brittle, a simple candy that I’ll make again and again. The candied Buddha’s hand, however, was a morning-of addition. I spotted a Cthulhu-esque Buddha’s hand at Market Hall, and I decided to try candying it. Of course, you have to chop all the pretty yellow tentacles into bite-size strips, but I hoped the unusual flavor would come through in the final product. It did, but I think next time I’ll only blanch it twice instead of the three times I do for normal candied citrus peel. There wasn’t enough bitterness to stand up against the sugary syrup and coating.

Mr. Manners On Dinner Parties

Many of you know that I’m a devoted listener of the Grammar Girl podcast. In today’s episode, she mentioned that Mr. Manners, one of the other podcasts in the same network, recently talked about dinner parties. There are transcripts for part 1 and part 2 if you don’t want to download the mp3s.

His points mirror ones I made in my SFist piece about hosting dinner parties, but he also covers polite ways to invite guests and get rid of ones that won’t leave. Some of his food suggestions wouldn’t fly in our house — I don’t put cheese on the appetizer platter and Melissa prefers to serve French press coffee — but his two posts have good, solid information.

This Weekend's Dinner Party

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

Only 2 percent of you have sounded off in the OWF 5-year Anniversary Reader Survey, but common threads have already begun to appear. One says, in short, “Don’t you ever cook anymore?”

I do, and I’ll renew my efforts to get more cooking posts onto this site. There’s no time like the present: We had our friends meriko and Russell over for a casual meal I threw together after the farmers’ market.

I sliced Fatted Calf Umbrian salumi and Charentais melon for a small appetizer plate, which I finished with salt-roasted pistachios and the last of our homemade olives. I always like to have snacks on the table when guests arrive — not to mention a glass of sparkling wine — and I liked the slight riff on the classic ham and melon pairing.

I had ideas about the appetizer platter before we got to the market, but I hadn’t put any thought into an opening course until I saw Phoenix Pastificio’s Meyer lemon pappardelle, wide noodles with a bit of tang from the mixed-in citrus zest. I bought zucchini and big, floppy, orange squash blossoms, and I mandolined the squash into thin planks that mimicked the noodles. I tossed the zucchini strips with salt and left them to drain before lightly sautéeing them with small onion dice and adding them to the pasta with the raw blossoms. A glass of Austrian Grüner Veltliner, relatively low in acid thanks to 2003’s soaring temperatures, washed down the light opener.

Everyone forgot about the pasta, however, when the roasted pork belly came to the table. A while ago, I purchased a share of pig meat that included two sides of belly, and I cured one in salt and herbs for a day before roasting it as described in The River Cottage Meat Book: 425° for 30 minutes and 350° for one hour. I cranked up the heat at the end to transform the scored skin into hard, brittle, crunchy bits of crackling that I could use as garnish for the layers of fat and meat on the plate. Slivers of pears roasted in canola oil and rosemary complemented the pork, and Massa rice with chiffonaded watercress added a semblance of nutrition to what is at heart a big chunk of bacon. The fatty pork and sweet pears in this dish demand a German Riesling, and far be it from me to argue with my food. I served a trocken spätlese Riesling from Germany’s Franken region.

Elise’s pretty plum galette inspired my peach and basil version, a casual dessert that allows a rustic — don’t call it sloppy — crust. Peach with basil is one of my favorite “surprise” pairings to present to guests, but meriko uses it as much as I do, so she wasn’t startled by its appearance. I topped each slice with a scoop of homemade vanilla ice cream. I hadn’t chosen a dessert wine, but meriko brought us Jepson’s Viognier Mistrel as a host present, and I knew the peaches-and-cream grape would pair well with our peaches-and-cream dessert.

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

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.

Duck In A Box

Photo by Clotilde Dusoulier

I couldn't quite fit this picture into the dinner party write-up, but it's always fun to show the big container I use to store my duck confit. Melissa had me bring it out for our guests, and cameras started going off. I've managed to get 20 legs from foie gras ducks into that container, though this time it only had to hold 16.

Dinner With Clotilde

Photos by Clotilde Dusoulier
Long-time readers may have noticed that we fell off the entertaining wagon for a time, but we couldn't resist having Clotilde over for dinner when she arrived in the area on her book tour. Even in our first letters to each other, Clotilde commented on how much she enjoyed reading about our dinner parties. We've since become friends, in the real world as well as in the blogosphere, and Melissa and I were thrilled that she'd have time for a quick bite during her Bay Area stay.

She encouraged us to invite whomever we'd like, and we settled on a gaggle of friends we thought would mesh, bloggers and non-bloggers alike. We must have chosen well: At one point, Melissa and I stood in the kitchen listening to the raucous conversation and said, "I think we could leave and they wouldn't notice." Few sounds are more satisfying than a group of friends having a lively conversation over a leisurely meal. We decided not to abandon them, lest they starve or die of thirst.

1999 J. Schram, Schramsberg, California Sparkling Wine
Appetizer
Platter of house-cured duck ham, homemade olives, homemade pickled sour cherries, snap peas steamed and tossed with butter and salt.
The snap pea idea came from Farm, the new restaurant at the Carneros Inn, where instead of olives they bring you a bowl of blanched, lightly dressed, vegetables.
Amuse 1
Hog Island Sweetwater oyster poached in white wine with crème fraîche and Tsar Nicoulai wasabi caviar
Inspired by The Hog Island Oyster Lover's Cookbook, which I intend to review soon.

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2003 Norheimer Kirschheck, Dönnhoff, Riesling Spätlese, Nahe, Germany

Amuse 2
Basil-infused custard with orange blossom jelly
Served in a decapitated eggshell.
Entrée
Terrine of foie gras with rhubarb-fennel-watercress salad
Served on toasted slices of homemade pain de mie.

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2001 Pickberry Vineyards, Ravenswood, Bordeaux blend, Sonoma Mountain, California
2001 Rancho Salina Vineyards, Ravenswood, Bordeaux blend, Sonoma Valley, California
Main
Duck confit with fava beans, asparagus, morels, and a red wine reduction.

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Amontillado Sherry, Lustau
Cheese
Silver Mountain Cheddar (cow's milk, Bravo Farms, Visalia, California) and San Andreas (sheep's milk, Bellwether Farms, Sonoma, California) with salt-roasted almonds, strawberries macerated in extra vecchio traditional balsamic vinegar, and Acme walnut levain.
Dessert
Strawberry-white chocolate ice cream with a vanilla tuile

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Liqueur de Poete, Caddell & Williams Germain Robin (thanks meriko)
Mignardise
Chocolate truffles enrobed with cacao nibs
Peanut brittle