Five-Course Dinner Party for Six

As you can see, I am playing a bit of catch-up this week on the food blog. I credit (among other things) the evils of television for my lackluster posting habits of late. Five reasons why TV is evil: (1) it's impossible to ignore when it's on, (2) it distracts me from the reading that I wish I were doing (3) it distracts me from posting to this blog, (4) it distracts me from all the other projects I wish I were working on, and (5) knowing all this, I watch TV anyway.

Well, one distraction that is much more powerful than television is eating and drinking with good friends. Last Saturday we hosted a dinner party with two other couples that have recently proven to be great new partners in the enjoyment of lovingly crafted foods and copious amounts of wine. For the occasion, Melissa planned an impressive five-course meal of dishes that (in Melissa's words) are all fairly easy to make. The night started with avocado and crab soup with creme fraiche and chopped scallions, an idea which Melissa borrowed from a dinner Ramon made for us on one of his visits here from The Netherlands. We had a chardonnay (Bogle Vineyards' current vintage, CA) and a kiwi sauvignon blanc (Matua Valley, 2008, Marlborough) open for this course.

For the second course Melissa pulled out that shrimp dish she put together for our anniversary dinner a couple of weeks ago. She sauteed some large peeled shrimp in garlic and butter (no wine this time) and served them up with tomato, red bell pepper, red onion, avocado, cilantro and lime salsa on small salad plates. If you look back at the previous post you'll notice that she changed the presentation a little to accommodate the smaller plates. Equally nice to look at. We were still working on those two white wines with this dish -- just getting warmed up, really.

Third course: prosciutto-wrapped asparagus with poached egg and Hollandaise sauce. Melissa dreamed this up as a brunch dish (previously using bacon), and couldn't resist bringing it out as part of a menu honouring the onset of spring (yes, it's still hovering around freezing in New England, but we know spring is out there somewhere...). Melissa wrapped up blanched asparagus bunches in prosciutto and then pan-seared them to create a great fried-ham aroma that had us all salivating, then topped them with egg and Hollandaise. This dish served as a perfect segue into the big beef dish...

We had a nice wine and cheese break during the preparation of the meat course: filet mignon with pan-roasted Brussels sprouts, reduced tomatoes and lima beans. David brought around a sample of his first stab at cheese-making. The gouda-style semi-soft cheese had a really great flavor and texture -- if this was David's maiden voyage in cheese-making I can't wait to see what he comes up with next... The Brussels sprouts were Melissa's inspiration for this dish, and her treatment made these tiny cabbages as beautiful to eat as they are to look at. They were halved and steamed before cooking them with butter and salt in a hot frying pan to brown the face. The sweet/tart reduced tomatoes and soft lima beans provided a nice variety of flavor and texture on the plate. And a good rare filet mignon never disappoints.

We had a couple of really nice reds with the meat dish that I want to mention. One of the wines brought by David and Kathy was a red blend from the Acorn Winery in Sonoma, California's Russian River Valley. Acorn's 2006 Medley is a blend of so many grapes it takes half the back label to list them: zinfandel, syrah, mourvedre, cinsaut, sangiovese, petite syrah, alicante bouschet and six different muscat varieties. Not kidding. The result is described in one review I found online as a "symphony of fruit." This is certainly accurate, but the fruit is also backed up by woody, peppery notes, and I would have guessed it was mostly zinfandel from my initial impression. This was a lively and thoroughly enjoyable red. The second bottle was a 2005 Miratus vin de pays d'oc from Domaine Phillippe Nusswitz between the Languedoc and the Rhône. We bought a couple of bottles of this wine after a recent tasting organized by a Quebecoise group some friends of ours belong to, and in the tasting we were struck by its unusually intense strawberry flavors. It's a really pleasant blend of syrah, grenache and mourvedre with plenty of fruit, a light to medium body and an eye-catching label. A great glass.

Finally we got to the dessert Melissa started making Friday night. She began with the idea of a trio of sorbets, then decided that cherries, strawberries and rhubarb had to be involved, and in the end decided that it needed a rich, creamy ice cream as well. The result was the beautiful trio pictured here. The one in back is a puree of Bing cherries (canned) frozen into a ball and then dipped into melted semi-sweet chocolate before re-freezing overnight. The concoction on the right is a strawberry and rhubarb puree that Melissa made on the spot with pre-frozen strawberries, fresh chopped rhubarb and a little sugar to sweeten. The tart berries and rich chocolate were balanced out by the scoop of butter pecan ice cream.

We brought out the second bottle of late-harvest gewurztraminer we brought back from New Zealand this year (2005 Judd Estate, Gisborne, by Matua Valley) to have with dessert, and when we finished that we opened the bottle of Weingut Johannishof German Riesling (2006) brought in by Beth and Per. I think we all suffered a bit of food and wine hangover on Sunday, but it was sooooo worth it.

Melissa pulled off another magnificent dinner without even breaking a sweat.

Our Wedding Anniversary

Melissa and I recently had a small but decadent gourmet celebration in honor of our second wedding anniversary (March 9). We like to have a bottle of wine from the vineyard where we were married (Ascension Wine Estate, Matakana, New Zealand) in honor of the special day, and so we bring back a few every time we visit Melissa's family. Currently we have "The Ascent" Reserve Chardonnay (2006) on hand, so we put together a small starter dish and a (considerably larger) cheese plate designed to complement the wine.

To start, Melissa made a simple but elegant shrimp dish. For each plate, a half dozen large peeled shrimp were sauteed in a white wine, butter and garlic sauce and served with a fresh salsa of chopped red capsicum, avocado, red onion, tomato and cilantro with a dash of lime juice. As you can see, it made a visually stunning presentation, and the classic shrimp, garlic and salsa flavor combination pairs nicely with a dry, crisp and fruity wine like The Ascent Chardonnay.

We love a simple cheese plate with a nice wine. You can find an endless supply of advice on wine and cheese pairings in books and on the internet, but of course what it really comes down to is just what you think tastes good together. Cheese can generally mask both the bad and the good characteristics of wine, so this is a terrible way to judge the intrinsic qualities of a wine. But just like any wine and food pairing, when you hit upon a really good combination the synergy can be a fantastically rewarding experience. We went to the Whole Foods cheese counter and chose a few cheeses based on three criteria: what we know we like, what looks (and smells) interesting, and what we think might pair nicely with a wine we already know quite well. The result of this thoroughly subjective exercise was the following collection of cheeses (clockwise from the blue):

Fourme d'Ambert -- a semi-hard, mild French blue cheese made from raw cow's milk

Robiola due Latte -- a soft-ripened brie from northern Italy made from cow and sheep's milk

Taleggio -- a semi-soft and mild tasting (but strong smelling) Italian cow's milk cheese

Hirtenkase Reserve -- a hard cow's milk cheese from southern Germany that resembles aged gouda

I think for both of us the Taleggio proved to be a very pleasant new discovery. It's a rich, creamy feel with an earthy flavor and a surprisingly fruity edge to it. That said, the Hirtenkase was the star of the evening as far as wine and cheese pairings go. Apparently what starts as a semi-hard cheese, kind of like a reggiano or aged gouda, actually softens with age. We had a relatively young one at 5 months, and we both would have put money on it to be aged gouda tasting it blind. Can't quite put a finger on what made the pairing so spectacular, but Melissa and I both looked around almost in confusion at how much the wine and cheese flavors both developed for the better when experienced together. A spot of fig jam added even more nutty, fruity goodness to the mix.

Happy anniversary to us...

Three Great Salads

In the couple of weeks after Valentine's Day, Melissa made good use of some leftover ingredients from our three-course love-day dinner by putting together some tasty salads. When we eat we are generally shooting for diversity, not low-fat or low-calorie per se, so you'll notice that these have some ingredients you wouldn't include in a typical starvation-diet salad. They tend to be much more enjoyable that way...

While I was away for a conference, Melissa made two salads for her own meals -- both with the aim of using up the iceberg lettuce she used in the shrimp cocktail. The first salad was stir-fried chicken thighs, sliced and marinated in a soy-sauce and sesame oil concoction with a drop of liquid smoke added for that wood-grilled flavor. Served up on a couple of handfuls of iceberg lettuce with cherry tomatoes and fresh green capsicum, salt and pepper and a dab of Kewpie Japanese mayonnaise for dressing. I wish I had been here to eat that.

A second salad saw a similar set of ingredients in a slightly different incarnation: an avocado half from that Valentine's Day shrimp cocktail replaced the capsicum, and a poached egg was added (because Melissa loves poached eggs). Again that Kewpie mayo makes the dish.

This last one I did get in on. Using the last of the great beef tenderloin in our freezer and the one remaining blood orange from the blood orange mimosas, Melissa made a salad that set my taste buds buzzing. On a bed of field greens she served up seared tenderloin slices (seasoned only with salt and pepper -- and very rare) with sections of orange. The dressing was balsamic vinegarette blended up with marinated green peppercorns and a few garlic cloves. The acids from the orange and balsamic complemented the seared beef beautifully.

All three salads would be good with a crisp, fruity sauv blanc (probably from New Zealand or Chile in our house) or a nice dry chenin blanc. I don't remember what we drank with the tenderloin salad, but it was probably one of those.

Salads make us long for summer weather -- only three months to go...