Hosting Dinner Parties: Our Favorite Indoor Activity!

In our "About Us" page, we promised that we wouldn't write too much about things like cooking dinner together.  This particular entry is going to make a liar out of that promise, but hopefully the occasional such posts will be forgiven...

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The subtitle for this blog identifies "Biking, Hiking, Eating, Traveling and Other Adventures" as the focus of Our Sabbatical Life.  While the rest are more outdoorsy activities, we find the sole indoor-oriented activity of EATING at least as important as any one of the rest.  (In fact, for me at least, food might be more critical than the ALL the rest combined!)

One of the ways we get the most out of our eating pleasure?: Hosting dinner parties.  We also like brunches and lunches and cocktail hours and weekend house parties too, but perhaps our preferred form of entertaining might be to have 2-4 extra people over for a long dinner that involves plenty of food, drinks, and wide-ranging conversation.

During our months in Montreal, we did not really have occasion to miss Chicago cultural attractions, its restaurants, or its weather.  The only aspect of Chicago we longed for in Canada were our friends.  (We missed family too, of course, but they are not in Chicago anyway...).  Since we returned to Chicago at the end of January (from our weeks in LA), we have been getting together with friends as much as possible to make up for lost time.  

Just this past weekend, we had two friends (and a dog!) over to our home.  When we have these get-togethers, we like going all out and developing an elaborate (well, for us anyway) multi-course menu.  Sometimes, as in the case of Easter, we might create a menu around a particular main course--for this year, garlic-rosemary rack of lamb.  Everything else then complements the lamb, in service of the star attraction.

This past weekend, our dinner was more eclectic.  Unlike with some holiday-themed dinners, there was no main course item with enough star power to relegate the others to the status of mere satellite dishes.  Instead, it was more a case of a-few-items-we-want-to-eat-now menu.  And it was fun!  

Let me give a rundown here of what we served, along with some brief notes on how to prepare them--in case anyone wants ideas for their own next gathering.

We started with Baked Brie with Sauteed Mushroom served with French baguette slices:

If you get one of those rounds of Brie in a wooden box, you can easily present an impressive appetizer by heating the whole round (removing the wrapper first!) in a 350 degree oven for 5-15 minutes, depending on what you want to accomplish. 

For instance, you can bake it whole for 5-10 minutes if you just want the Brie slightly runny to be easily cut into wedges.  Or, you can slice a thin layer from the top and bake for 10-15 minutes if you want it sort of bubbly and more liquid, more spreadable.  Then, you can top with--as we did--some cremini mushroom sauteed with shallots, garlic, and thyme.  Don't forget to sprinkle parsley on top and provide some thin bread slices.  Then you scoop up some cheese and mushroom mixture and spread that on top of the bread.

(You can also wrap a Brie with puff pastry and spread some chutney or apricot preserves, etc., under the pastry--on the top side of the Brie!--before baking it.  There are LOADS of ideas and instructions on the internet.) 

After we spent a good long time hanging out in the living room with the Baked Brie (and some roasted mixed nuts, Marcona almonds, and garlic-rosemary marinated olives), we moved over to the dining table for our soup course.  

It had been a suddenly very warm day in Chicago, and we were pretty excited to have Chilled Melon Soup with Apple-Crab Salad (pictured at the top of post).

This is one of the easiest dishes to prepare, and one of the most impressive to present to your guests.  There is an appreciable difference between the labor and the wow factor for this soup, and it's a nice fallback of ours, especially during the summer months.  I got the idea originally from Gordon Ramsay's Fast Food (p. 20), but now I can usually make it without consulting the recipe.

Basically, you puree a sweet melon with a few tablespoons of plain yogurt and a few cubes of ice and a pinch of salt.  Then adjust seasoning, texture, and color to taste.  So, if you don't have Charentais melon that's called for--and usually those wonderfully sweet melons are not available in U.S. grocery stores--then you might need to add a tiny bit of sugar to a cantaloupe--and, really, a bit more salt helps bring out the sweetness as well.  If you think the soup is too thick, then add some more ice.  If you want the soup to look a little creamier, then add some more yogurt.  In all cases, start with smaller amounts since it's easier to add rather than subtract the sugar, salt, ice, or yogurt.

You can really prepare the crab salad any way you prefer, or you can take Gordon Ramsay's suggestion to combine lump crab meat with diced apple, shallot, cilantro, grain mustard, mayonnaise, lime juice, salt and pepper.  Use your judgment with the amounts.  I do find that the slight sweetness of the finely diced apple helps tie with the melon soup, while the creamy and savory crab salad adds a nice contrast to the sweet fruitiness as well.

Mound a small amount of salad in the middle of a soup bowl, and then carefully pour the now-chilled melon soup around it.  It looks like something you'd get at a restaurant--hence, guests are always impressed--but the whole dish comes together in mere minutes.  The most expensive element, of course, is the crab meat, but places like Costco or Fresh Farms sell a sizable container of crab meat for a reasonable price.  Use what you need (about 5 oz. as per the recipe's suggestion to make 4 servings) and then the rest can go into making crab cakes.  Besides, a soup like this in a restaurant would cost a LOT more than what you would spend on the ingredients for all 4 servings at home.

Next, we offered up several items for the main course.  In a way, we treated this course as two pairs of  smaller main-courses-and-sides put together.  For a vegetarian option, we offered a Savory Sweet Potato Tart (right above) along with a Bean and Tomato Salad (below).

We modified this recipe from Williams-Sonoma's Vegetable of the Day (p.274), and it was originally called a "Winter Squash and Pecorino Tart."  But we like it with sweet potatoes, so we've played around with the recipe to use roast sweet potatoes instead.  Basically, you layer a tart pastry with caramelized red onion and thyme, then a sprinkling of Pecorino and Parmesan cheeses, then pour a mixture of mashed roast sweet potatoes blended with cream and egg.  Then bake!

The tart, served slightly warm, goes nicely with a cool salad (pictured above) of parboiled beans cooked for just a few minutes and then chilled, tomatoes, shredded basil, and a balsamic-garlic vinaigrette.  Balsamic and the sweet potatoes contribute sweetness, but those are offset by the cheese and onion savory components.  The tartness of the vinegar cuts everything nicely, and garlic and herbs are always welcome additions (in my opinion anyway...).

For ourselves, we would have been more than happy with this tart and salad main course, but since we were also having guests, we added Grilled Cumin Shrimp with Tropical Fruit Salsa (both pictured below).

We got this idea from Hay Day Country Market Cookbook (p.172-3), a little paperback--and usually the only cookbook--that comes with us if we go to live away from home for over a month.  While we find most other cookbooks of ours containing recipes which we can find equivalents of on the internet, Hay Day is more original, eclectic, innovative.  (Moreover, it's smaller and lighter than most cookbooks, so its portability is another plus.)

In any case, their Grilled Shrimp is another dish that we'll never need to consult a recipe for any more since it's so streamlined.  You toss shelled and deveined (but tail-on) large shrimp with chopped garlic, ground cumin, parsley, olive oil, salt and pepper, and then grill.  Voila!

In fact, for us the greatest challenge for this dish is finding affordable non-farmed large shrimp--16-20 count is about what we go for.  Ever since I read a string of books about modern farming and fishing practices, I have opted either to skip fish and meat or to consume responsibly.  This means we wait for specials like when Whole Foods offered $3 off per pound of their large wild-caught shrimp before deciding on a dish like this...

In any case, Hay Day does make this dish a bit more challenging by suggesting that you serve the shrimp with their "Tropical Fruit Salsa," which means lots and lots of peeling, cutting, dicing, and/or pitting of pineapple, mango, tomatillos, red onion, and cilantro.  Then you squeeze on some lime juice, sprinkle on some salt and pepper and olive oil.  (We chose to skip the jalapeno because one of our guests could not eat spicy foods, but, honestly, we didn't miss the jalapeno at all.)

Then, once we were done with seconds of the main course items, three hours after dinner began, we went to a light Berry Galette with Vanilla Bean Ice Cream:

This galette is, once again, a hodge-podge resulting from our experiments with different dessert recipes.  Possibly, the easiest way to give attribution would be to say we first got this idea from Ina Garten's "Summer Fruit Crostada" (p. 203-4 of Barefoot Contessa at Home) and then modified it with "Mixed Berry Galette" (p. 104 of Williams-Sonoma's Dessert of the Day).

Will especially likes to bake galettes during the summer because it's less fussy and less work than a pie, but also light and pleasantly rustic.  After a long dinner, we don't necessarily need a heavy or large dessert, and this is where just a touch of sweet something helps round out the meal.

Basically, roll out your favorite recipe for a single-layer pie/tart/galette crust, fill the middle with 4-5 cups of mixed berries (fresh or thawed from frozen) mixed with some sugar, lemon juice, and a bit of flour, then fold over the sides about 2 inches.  Bake.  Williams Sonoma recipe uses only 1/4 of sugar, so it's not even that bad for you--except the ice cream that you later pile on...  

Our Katie and our friend's dog Duchie had a full evening of sniffing each other, wagging their tails, and vying for our attentions.  By the time dessert and after-dinner drinks were all dispensed with, they were alternately sleeping on the dining table rug and wondering when their humans would just stop talking and take them out for their walks. 

Great food, great friends, and great conversation.  We are looking forward to a summer full of more of "All of the above."