Dinner Partying

21Apr08

Ever since we moved into our new house I’ve wanted to have a dinner party, but I had no dining room chairs and every room was filled with cardboard boxes spilling out into the hallways. The list of people I was promising to invite to this imagined dinner party kept growing, while my prospects of actually having it were not. At long last, I acquired dining room chairs, and slowly but surely the cardboard boxes morphed into novel things like couches and coffee tables. Virtually all of our furniture is from Ikea, and while I am still enamored with the mountains of accessible design they have to offer, suffice to say, they confuse their orders often, and some things are blood vessel popping annoying to put together. That said, a lot of it is really easy and satisfying to assemble, and if you are particularly crafty with things like hammers and screws, the furnitures is easily modifiable. I, however, am not particularly handy with those things. But if you are, check out Ikea Hacker. Honestly, you don’t even have to be that handy, just motivated.

I digress from Ikea back to the topic of partying, dinner partying. Last Sunday, after spending days creating an overly ambitious menu, I had my first dinner party in our new abode with eight of our most favoritest friends (though one of my uber-favorites couldn’t make as she was diligently working on a paper). My friends brought beer, helped me with the dishes, and praised me like I so desperately need. After dinner, when there were eight chairs pushed back from our little table that is really only made for six and everyone was congregating on our front porch, my home finally felt gezellig, which is a Dutch word that is difficult to translate into English. It can be best captured in an amalgamation of the words cozy, delightful, and friendly. It is a word for an atmosphere or vibe of satisfying social interaction. Think warm yellow light, an early spring night, a porch full of your favorite friends, bellies full of fennel stuffed pork, truffled polenta with shiitake mushrooms, and roasted asparagus, and glasses full of beer and wine respectively. That’s the best definition of gezellig I can think of.

Pictured above are two out of the three hors d’oeurvres that I made, Bon Appetit’s asparagus tart with soppressata, ricotta, and comte cheese on puff pastry, Stilton and dalmatian fig spread on sea salt and olive oil crackers, and (not pictured, sadly, as they were eaten before they could be immortalized) roasted roma tomato spread with Humboldt fog cheese on rosemary crackers. This is the second time I have made the asparagus tart and it has been most excellent each time. This time I split my sheet of puff pastry in two and made one tart with the salami and one without, as we had a vegetarian in our midst. I also vegetarianized the roasted yellow pepper and roasted tomato soup by using “no chicken broth”, and the soup turned out wonderful. I think it was everyone’s favorite. Besides, it looks fancy, and that always makes things taste better, right? I served the two soups in the same bowl, carefully poured to result in the effect you see below, with a dollop of spicy serrano creme fraiche. As mentioned above I served a pork loin stuffed with fennel as the main course, it was good but next time I would try this recipe.

Prince, Joy Division, and The Jesus and Mary Chain were played, all the beer and wine was drank, and I think the last of our friends left around 3:00 AM. The evening ended in drunken conversations about kombucha and how we should hang our poster of Prince in the shower over our guest bathroom sink instead of a mirror.

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Filed under: Food Stuffs, Uncategorized   |  1 Comment
Tags: asparagus tart, cooking, dinner party, eating, fennel stuffed pork loin, food, gezellig, ikea, polenta, pork loin, prince in the shower, roasted tomatoes, roasted yellow peppers, shiitake mushrooms, truffled polenta