Dinner

[lillibet]

This year friends of mine have been doing a series of tasting menus at their home. It seemed like so much fun that tonight I decided to repay the favor.




Everything came out well and I think we managed to serve it with a minimum of fuss. Some of the recipes are new--I'll do a separate entry on those--and others are old favorites that I enjoyed sharing. It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. I'm particularly pleased that I seem to have managed the portions reasonably well, since causing my dinner guests to explode was not one of of my goals. I think I'll have to do this again sometime, but next time I'll schedule it for better cooking weather and a time when I don't have a show looming on the horizon.

Comments

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Wow...

*drools unreservedly*

This is such a cool dinner party idea. But wow, what a lot of work and expensive ingredients!

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

Well, one saving grace is that you don't have to buy much of anything :)

I didn't track the expenses, but I think it worked out to about what we'd pay for one of us at Number Nine Park. Definitely a special-occasion kind of meal, but not an expensive way to have one of those.

It was a lot of work, but oddly less stressful than doing, say, Thanksgiving dinner. Somehow making lots of little dishes was easier than making big honkin' quantities of a few things. I started about a week ago and had five courses entirely done before today, three more finished earlier today along with most of the components for the other six. When the whole thing was over, I only had three pans to wash.

[pekmez.livejournal.com]

that sounds like a fabulous treat!

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

It was that! And now to unload the dishwasher for the fourth time today.

[jencallisto]

Wow. That looks amazing.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I think it was pretty special.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Are you getting good enough tomatoes to make good tomato water already? *is jealous*

This sounds lovely. How many people?

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

Enh. It wasn't as good as the batch I made last summer, but the greenhouse ones at the farmers' market are pretty good. You may have heard we're losing most of the field tomatoes to the blight. Is that hitting your area?

Dinner was for six, since that's the comfortable capacity of our dining room.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that it's not. I had one of my heirloom tomato plants die due to mold, but I think that was just because of the incredibly wet weather we've been having. But almost none of the tomato growers near here grow any interesting tomatoes, unfortunately.