We had Ruth and Michael over for a casual dinner. The idea, you see, was a sort of Greek salad on pasta, more or less inspired by this recipe.Simple and easy. In fact, it was simple and easy, but each step took a lot longer than we thought it would. So we just put the guests to work, and kept the wine glasses topped up.
Earlier we had made a batch of pasta dough, colored and flavored with a lot of saffron threads (see here for making pasta.)
The appetizers, while we grilled various things, were
• one fish, two fish, red fish, bluefish pâté with
• freshly baked pane pugliese
• fresh small local strawberries, which Ruth brought from Athens (Ohio, that's why they were local), which went very well with
• a runny brie (I don't care how fuc . . . oh, never mind)
The grilled objects were:
• a mess o' shrimp (or shimps) marinated in a little olive oil and garlic, skewered (so they didn't fall off like last time).
• a mess o' cherry tomatoes, skewered too.
• a mess o' red onion, sliced through the root. These, too,
probably should have been skewered.
• a mess o' green pepper slices, which didn't need to be skewered.
(Note, the word skewered, which looked weird to begin with, now begins to take on an almost hallucinatory feel.)
As each one was grilled until just tender we tossed it in another bowl with extra-virgin olive oil and
• a mess o' fresh oregano, finely chopped
• a half pound or so of crumbled feta.
A final droozle of oil, and we ladled it all onto the just-boiled pasta, which the guests had helped pitch and catch as it went through the pasta machine and the fettucine-izer.
This worked out beautifully. Very few cherry tomatoes were dropped on the floor, and absolutely no shrimp. The cherry tomatoes that were not on the floor but in the bowl gave up just enough juice to wet the pasta, along with contributions from the other vedge and shrimpage.
For dessert:
• blueberries in Triple Sec (the true water of life)
• Graeter's mocha chip and mango sorbet
• meringue cookies.
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