It was a gorgeous meal, and honestly, so simple that I often make it for myself when I feel like putting a little extra effort into my dinner and making something special.

Sole Meuniere (adapated from Ina Garten)

• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon Vege Sal
• 1 teaspoon black pepper
• 2 fresh sole fillets (3-4 ounces is a good size, but you can buy them as large as will fit in your pan)
• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 teaspoon grated lemon zest
• 3 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice (3 lemons)
• 1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley

Email or Share This Post

http://www.domestifluff.com/2009/07/rosemary-thyme-oven-fries/

I keep thinking about the garlic-lemon aioli that I made for Christmas Eve dinner. It was SO yummy that I desperately want an excuse to make it again for another dinner party, and I found one in these heavenly rosemary-thyme oven fries. Wouldn’t they be tasty dipped into garlic-lemon aioli? I love all those herbs and spices together.

The flavors in both components are strong, so serve them with salmon cooked simply with salt and pepper, your favorite vegetable and a nice bread. Or, to make the menu gluten-free, just leave the bread out. It’s a casual family-style dinner, but you won’t be able to make it ahead. To make up for that, prepare dessert earlier with something easy, like cookies.

Rosemary and Thyme, Garlic and Lemon Menu

Main Courses:

• Rosemary-Thyme Oven Fries, served with Garlic-Lemon Aioli
• Salmon, such as this, this or this recipe
• Vegetables and Warm Bread

Dessert:

• Cookies, such as Brown Butter Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies or Jam-Filled Sugar Cookies

Email or Share This Post

Now, I do not subscribe to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop newsletter.  Let’s just make that clear straight away.  I loved Gwyneth in Shakespeare in Love and Sliding Doors, but I do not need to know her opinions on what $1800 Christmas gifts I should buy my friends, what Balenciaga coin purse I should buy, or how we should all really sleep more than eight hours.  My friend subscribes, though, and she forwards it to me when she thinks it particularly interesting or entertaining – which is how I got this particular tip about a place which, yes, as much as I hate to admit it, is kind of awesome.

rivercottage.net

River Cottage is a sustainable farm in England that offers courses in such classic skills as breadmaking, beekeeping, mushroom foraging and butchering and cooking various animals “in a day”.  They also have evening dinners made with food grown and cooked on the farm that I definitely want to go to the next time I’m across the pond.  How wonderful to have a meal in which you grew the food and  know exactly where it came from and what you’re putting in your body – something that is difficult to do in NYC.  I love that the White House has a garden now and is raising awareness about knowing where your food comes from.  Anyway…I digress…the point of this is that River Cottage has a yummy butternut squash and blue cheese recipe on its website and I got excited  about making a simple vegetarian and gluten-free fall menu around it!  This would be lovely for just yourself or for a casual dinner party – it would have been great at my Sweet Home Dinner last week!  I’ll have to remember it for next time.

krissa.org

Fall Greenmarket Menu

• Stuffed Butternut Squash
• No Cream Creamed Spinach
• Quinoa

Email or Share This Post

It was gorgeous and a wonderful evening. Alexis was down from Connecticut for the day and stopped by to stay hi while I was stringing the flowers for the ceiling. Of course I invited her to stay for dinner, and she was such a wonderful addition to our party – and got to hear lots of stories about Fairfield (where we all grew up) that either scared or intrigued her! Ha!

It’s an artistic group, so it was really fun to create a colorful table with bouquets of color pencils over brown craft paper that begged to be drawn on. I used it as the easiest place cards ever – just wrote everyone’s names above their plates.

The flowers were simple, but added a punch of color. I bought four bunches of carnations in yellow and three shades of pink, and kept each color in its own vase rather than mixing them. It made the flowers look cohesive and at the same time, with the colored pencils, made the table as a whole very colorful.

I then strung blossoms on three long strands of thread and hung them from the ceiling for something more festive and with a little bit of South Asian flair.

We made gorgeous doodles.

And the food…Anna brought her gorgeous macaroons made with organic sweetened condensed milk, but I was so consumed with eating them that I completely forgot to take a photograph. Just imagine perfectly browned, chewy golden macaroons, and you’ll have a good sense of how lovely they were. Please continue for the post-mortem on my dishes.

Everything turned out really well except for the haricots verts, which I didn’t cook quite long enough.

I prepped as much as I could earlier in the day. It took me about 2.5 hours to clean mushrooms and chop walnuts for the pasta, make the zucchini rollup appetizer, make the butternut squash soup, do the dishes and clean up the kitchen. I then mostly followed my plan for the evening, except that I totally forgot to take the soup out of the fridge on time. Instead, I remembered and started heating it at the same time I put the pasta in the oven. However, luckily, the soup heated very quickly and the pasta took longer than expected to bake, so it all worked out just fine and we did have dinner fairly on time – I think we started eating a little after 8, which to me is a win for my 7:45 goal!

Zucchini Rollups

I admit I was a bit worried these would be too boring to open the show with a bang, but they were fantastic. I liberally salt and peppered the zucchini and grilled it slowly on my stovetop grill pan, which gave it rich grill marks and the softness needed to roll them up. My one tip: make sure you cut the zucchini thinly enough to roll it!  My first two slices were far too thick and I didn’t realize it until it was too late.  But don’t worry – they made a nice addition to my lunch.

Curry Butternut Squash Soup

I don’t know if it was just the curry powder that I bought, but I put in the amount the recipe calls for and found it quite spicy. I am very sensitive to spice, though, so – of course AFTER I put it all in, I realized this! – I should have started with half the amount and then seasoned to taste. I also found the soup very bland based on the recipe, so I added salt, pepper, Vege-Sal, nutmeg and cinnamon to taste. I probably used a few teaspoons of salt, about a teaspoon of Vege-Sel, half a teaspoon of nutmeg, and a sprinkle of cinnamon. I loved it with the yogurt and, best of all, it looked beautiful as the first course.

Corn Pasta with Gorgonzola, Mushrooms and Walnuts, Haricots Verts

I cut the mushrooms and walnuts during my prep earlier in the day, and couldn’t find a safe place to put the walnuts where they wouldn’t be tipped over until I came up with the toaster oven! So of course I had to take a photo of my geniusness, haha. The grownup mac and cheese tasted tangy and creamy – and the mushrooms were goooorrrrgeous!

Unfortunately I didn’t roast the haricots verts long enough – I just pulled them out of the oven when I took the pasta dish out, and while the bean I tried tasted nicely al dente, overall they were still too crunchy. I’m going to work on my recipe and I’ll post it when it actually results in haricots verts that taste the way I want them to.

It was a wonderful evening – thank you for coming, everyone!

Email or Share This Post

So this is excellent, and will let me go with my original menu idea of soup followed by pasta and simple veggies, and maybe a nice brown bread for the gluten eaters.  One of my guests offered to bring macaroons for dessert, which are obviously gluten-free and sound soooo good!  I’ll just save the balsamic truffles for another time; it’s always kind of a nice feeling to know you’ve got a dessert in your back pocket that will go with almost any meal and no one has seen it before.  We’ll start with a nice simple zucchini and goat cheese appetizer, which I can not only make the day before, but will be extra vegetables (always good!) and a little protein in the cheese.

As for libations, a non-drinking friend is bringing something tasty and non-alcoholic. For the drinkers, I think the wine will have to marry well with the gorgonzola but otherwise could probably be whatever you like. I’ll probably just ask at the wine shop what they would recommend, as I’m no wine expert. I even went to a lovely wine tasting the other night that was meant to be focused on how to order wine from a mysterious wine list – we all know how foreign those look, right?! This was information I needed! – and I kid you not, the advice they gave over and over was “Ask the sommelier.” So basically there is no way to figure it out yourself. Oh well, I still had a great time at the tasting and got to see friends from college, so it was overall a win.

Sweet Home Dinner Menu

• Zucchini Roll-ups

• Curried Butternut Squash Soup with brown bread and herb butter

• Gluten-Free Pasta baked with Mushrooms, Gorgonzola and Walnuts (continue for the recipe)
• Roasted green beans with balsamic vinegar and honey

• Macaroons from my friend AC

…..

Gluten-Free Pasta baked with Mushrooms, Gorgonzola and Walnuts
Adapted from The Best-Ever One-Pot Cookbook
Serves Six

• 3 tablespoons butter
• 1 1/2 tablespoons vegetable or canola oil
• 6 cups chestnut or crimini mushrooms, halved
• 3 leeks, thinly sliced
• 21 ounces tube corn pasta, like penne or macaroni – or other gluten-free pasta
• 9 ounces gorgonzola cheese
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 1/3 cup whole milk
• 1/2 cup dry vermouth
• 3/4 cup finely chopped walnuts
• 1 1/2 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese
• salt and pepper to taste

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F.  Put a large pot of salted water on the stove and heat it until boiling, then add the pasta and cook until just barely tender (you want it very al dente so when you bake it later, the pasta finishes cooking in the oven).  Drain the pasta and rinse with cold water to stop the cooking process.

Melt the butter and oil in a large pan, then add the mushrooms and leeks and saute them for about 4-5 minutes, until tender.  Put them in a bowl and set aside.  Using the same pan, crumble the gorgonzola into the pan and stir over low heat until melted.  Add the cream, milk and vermouth, then season with salt and pepper to taste.

Put the pasta in a large casserole dish (or divide into individual baking dishes if you have them) and top with an even layer of the mushrooms and leeks. Cover with the gorgonzola sauce and sprinkle the chopped walnuts and parmesan cheese on top.  Bake for about 15 minutes, until the cheese is golden and bubbling.

Email or Share This Post

So, where to start?   Of the five, two are on gluten-free diets and at least one is vegetarian, so this will be a gluten-free veggie meal. I know that to carnivores that sounds like it will be really boring, but come on, guys: just because there’s no meat or wheat doesn’t mean there won’t be filling or have a ton of flavor. Because it’s fall and getting chillier, and because I rarely make soup, I think a lovely soup would be perfect to start. Ellie Krieger makes a butternut squash soup with curry powder, which sounds like it has a spicy kick and switches up the usual squash soup flavors.

Then, a dish that has always gotten rave reviews and is quite filling is tagliatelle baked with gorgonzola and walnuts (sort of a very grownup mac and cheese). Clearly pasta has wheat in it and is therefore forbidden, but I’m thinking of making the dish with rice pasta, which is gluten-free. The only hiccup is that I’ve never tried rice pasta and have no idea what it tastes like, so that’s something I really need to taste before serving it to guests.

If the rice pasta doesn’t substitute well, maybe a little breakfast at dinner with eggs florentine over polenta and baked oven fries on the side. Ooh that sounds good, but I have to think about how to execute poached eggs for six people. Other ideas: eggplant parmesan (too typical?) or a lentil and veggie frittata (with quinoa and maybe a balsamic reduction?).

Lastly, balsamic vinegar truffles (taking a cue from my Black and White Inspiration), which will be rich enough to end the meal, yet small enough to enjoy without guilt.  I can also make them the day before and then forget about them, which is always a good thing.

I haven’t even gotten to decor yet, though I keep thinking of bouquets of crayons and butcher paper – sometimes decor dictates the menu, but with so many food restrictions, I’m going to figure out the menu first. So: I need to try rice pasta and then make a decision.

Email or Share This Post

Something about these simple stark white hydrangea bunches against the black dresses is really inspiring me – except as accent colors, black and white are so rarely used on tables.  How fun would it be to have such a dramatic table?

• Starter:
  • Endive and Blue Cheese Salad
• Entrees:
  • Poached Salmon with Tzatziki
  • Pesto Potato Salad
• Dessert:
  • Balsamic Chocolate Truffles

• Entrees:
  • Roast Chicken
  • Dill Fingerling Potatoes
  • Steamed Green Beans with Spike and Garlic
• Dessert:
  • Balsamic Chocolate Truffles

Email or Share This Post