Saturday December 20
It's fun to have guests over in
this festive season, especially as we have more time to prep and fuss over the
food when classes are out. So we asked Rama,
Erik, Shari, and Jack over to share our mid-Chanukah, pre-Christmas
celebration.
Our hors d'oeuvres table included black and green olives, jalapeño
salad, hummus with David's zaatar and fresh oregano leaves from the
garden, Barbara's pickled daikon, carrot, and apple-tizer, and her goat cheese
spread whipped up with garden arugula and chervil, plus brie and other cheeses to
go with crackers.
For our main course, Holt took two
mighty fillets of salmon, sliced them into six portions, sprinkled each with
lemon thyme leaves and sorrel from the garden, and with his pastry bag, surrounded
them with a crust of pommes duchesse
- a recipe that is in Old but not New Joy - and baked them into beautiful
presentation pieces. What's more using just the
eggyolks to make the potatoes leaves us more whites for Holt's granola.
The salad course to follow that up
was baby spinach, a little garden arugula, four avocados, and crabmeat, in a dressing
of red grapefruit sections, shallots, oil and white balsamic. Very refreshing.
For dessert, Holt prepared classic
Florentine cookies, again only seen in Old
Joy, so dependably retro - in memory of our friend Bob, for whose birthday
parties, on Dec. 17, we used to make them.
There was Graeter's coconut chip and eggnog ice creams to go with the
cookies, and you can't get more festive than that.
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