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.