Dinner with Ally and Dave

Saturday 4 October
Our nice piscivorous friends Ally and Dave came over for dinner bearing a marvelous wine: Flat Rock "The Rusty Shed" 2005 chardonnay.

We started with those Gordon Ramsay zuke rolls, which worked out nicely this time due to a firmer ricotta (which we also let drain for about 5 hours), seasoned with just a shot of basil, lime zest, and a smidge of olive oil. Plus a platter of lovely cheeses, slices of Holt's olive oil bread, and some yellow and red cherry tomatoes from the Amish-looking people at the Farmer's Market.

We roasted and peeled some unbearably cute lil' beets, which leave you looking as if you've just finished a particularly enthusiastic bout of arm wrestling with Raskolnikov, and added a drizzle of oil and two little herbed, crumbed, and baked goat cheese rounds for the yuppie touch.
(no further pictures, because we were having too good a time to document the good time we were having).

Then a vasty bowl of linguine dressed with (Lakeland Meats) smoked trout in a cream sauce. The sauce had just a little scallion sautéed in butter, then lotsa cream, and a shower of pink peppercorns - our lemon vodka is in the fridge in Cincinnati, alas. The green and pink made a pretty picture.

The wines continued with Mike Weir Sauvignon Blanc 2007 (a nice, tart, rather New Zealandy type of sauv. blanc: more grapefruit, little grass or flower) and Chat-en-Oeuf 2007, which we bought entirely for the label and only got the joke when we got it home.*

But the best aspect of the evening, besides Ally and Dave's conversation was a new cake: raspberry cake with marsala. The basic recipe is HERE. It's infinitely adaptable: no marsala in our cupboard here, so I used 1/2 cup of orange juice plus 1/4 brandy. No topping; doesn't need it. The raspberries, despite getting tossed in flour (an old trick) still made a Captain Nemo-like plunge, but that makes no difference. What makes this work is the merde-load of butter. And it keeps forever. Well, it would have, if we hadn't had it for dessert three nights running. Went extremely well with a Vineland Vidal 2006 Icewine (nice apricot notes).

*Chateauneuf, get it?