Dinner Party #4: BRUNCH!

Just 13 hours after wrapping our  Surf and Turf for 2, we hosted our 4th food gathering with friends. Brunch!

I've always loved hosting brunch. It's not too difficult to pull something great together. This particular menu was balanced with Saturday's dinner. I knew I wasn't going to use all day Saturday prepping baked goods.

I fried some bacon and parboiled asparagus. I  gave myself 2 gold stars for that.

MENU

Drinks

• Coffee, of course
• Orange Juice 

Savory

• Bacon, Asparagus, Goat Cheese Quiche (My go to recipe that is a modification of a Fannie Farmer recipe)
• Breakfast sausages 

Sweet

• Jam-filled Sweet French bread French toast (from a Moosewood cookbook )
• Fresh fruit salad with bananas, strawberries, blueberries  & full-fat whole-milk Stoneyfield vanilla yogurt

Wine

•     Super tasty green wine Clint and Anne-Marie brought.

THE PREP

This was pretty easy, as planned. I bought the quiche crust (I've almost got the nerve and equipment to try my own) and took care of cooking the quiche fillings on Saturday. Sunday morning I threw the quiche in the oven and Kent was responsible for the jam-filled french toast. He knocked it out of the park, I must say. 

THE VERDICT 

As far as brunch goes, it was great. Excellent company and satisfying breakfast foods served at a table with nice dishes. It wasn't a stretching my wings cooking opportunity that I am looking for. It did, however, stretch the dishwasher packing skills of Kent and I. There is no room for error when trying to recover from a massive dinner dish whirlwind in less than 13 hours. Well done, Kent!

THE PRETTY PICTURES

Go to Flickr for full collection. 

Dinner Party #3: Just the 2 of us + 3 sticks of butter

Dinner party #3 was an intimate affair - Kent, me,  a bottle of wine we've been saving,  and an unconscionable amount of butter. 

It was delicious. 

I used it as an opportunity to stretch my skills a bit and use decadent ingredients. It was our "we've been married a month and have new dishes" celebration. Perhaps we'll do another Dinner Party when we've been married 51/365 of a year and the moon is nearly full.

Anyway, this meal was the least convenient so far in the "everything effortlessly comes together" category. In fact, it was decidedly not that, but dishes did finish when they needed to, and I kept the lights low enough to mask the glean on my forehead.

MENU

Appetizer

• Scallops with Ginger Lime Beurre Blanc Sauce

Salad

• Arugula, Pear, Pancetta & Ricotta Salata

Main Course

• Grilled Filet Mignon and Lobster Tail with Spicy Garlic Shallot Butter
• Roasted Sugar Snap Peas 
• Roasted fingerling potatoes (courtesy of Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone)

Dessert

• Strawberry Shortcakes  

Wine

• 2005 Del Dotto Cabernet Savignon 

THE PREP

I started prep WAY later than I should have, due to an ambitiously scheduled hair appointment. 

I basically started prep at 2 pm and worked straight through the main course. Oops. On the upside, I did manage to sneak in a tiny bit of prep for Dinner Party #4, aka the Brunch we were hosting THE NEXT MORNING! (another meal, another post)

You can see below the busyness around the second course, and also how comfortable I was letting Kent handle grilling, since there is no mention of it anywhere. For the record, he started grilling right after salad and we didn't start eating at 8:05.

      7:30 Serve Scallops

      7:45 Serve Salad

               Turn broiler on

      8:00 Make snap peas

      8:05 Serve dinner

THE VERDICT

The scallops were great and my beurre blanc sauce was an excellent consistency. I would use bacon instead of pancetta next time for the salad. The pancetta was too salty. 

The main course was excellent - steaks were perfect, the butter was an excellent pairing with the lobster, and the simple prep for the snap peas was delicious. After buying all the potatoes, I realized that a risotto would have been the perfect pairing with the lobster and steak, but that would definitely have been more hands-on prep sweat that I could have hidden with low light.

The most disappointing part of the meal was the shortbread. I mean, it was only as disappointing as a fresh strawberry and whipped cream dessert can be. However, the shortcake was too dense. I believe I used the words "hockey puck" to describe it. I have a lot of learn about baking, and this attempt was a great lesson in butter consistency and over-worked dough (my friend Caryl taught me after-the-fact). Thankfully, Caryl gave me some great pointers on how to avoid the same problem next time so this dessert might make a second appearance soon.

THE PRETTY PICTURES
You can see the complete gallery on Flickr.

Shout out

Our wedding got a shout out in a weekly Friday column on Green Wedding Shoes - an artsy DIY wedding blog that I checked out pretty frequently for ideas when planning.

After spending months looking at wedding blogs that featured super cool, well designed weddings, I gotta say,  I'm flattered.

They feature a lot of Scott's weddings. They might be BFFs for all I know, but they are validating that my taste isn't terrible. I'll take it!


At some point soon, I'll do a more in-depth post on The Biggest Dinner Party We'll Ever Throw, aka Our Wedding.  Awaiting the full caboodle of pictures from W. Scott Chester.