Dinner party

While on vacation, I cooked for a bunch of my friends. I turned two baskets of fresh produce from my mom's garden and the contents of one meat freezer into a fun evening for everyone. Here's what we had:

A magnum of really good pink champagne (bought at cost from the restaurant, of course)
Mojitos

Peach and tomato gazpacho
Grilled chicken and pork with fresh rosemary
Grilled squash salad with leeks, tarragon and dill
Grilled okra
Roasted potatoes with sage and chives
Beet, apple and ginger slaw
Blackberry cobbler

We even broke out the good china.

Wine from my collection: Puro Rose

Yes, that bottle is meant to be upside-down.


Movia Puro Rose is a sparking rose wine, made on the border of Slovenia and Italy. It's stored upside-down because its yeasts have never been disgorged.

This bottle, if you can find it, is a perfect conversation piece for a party.

See, when champagne/sparkling wine is made, the winemakers first make a still white wine. Then they put that still wine in bottles and add yeast and sugars. The yeast eats the sugar, creating carbon dioxide, which is trapped in the bottle--that's what creates the bubbles in champagne.

Normally, the bottles are then turned, slowly pulling all the yeast down into the neck of the bottle, into a plug that can be disgorged. The yeast plug shoots out, the winemaker tops off the bottle with a little more grape juice and sugar, and reseals it, leaving the bubbles intact.

But the Puro Rose was never disgorged. That yeast plug was still in there.

For last weekend's dinner party, I got a bottle. (Courtesy of my restaurant, which allows me to buy the wine off their list at cost. This bottle was not in fact on the wine list--it was brought in for a special occasion dinner a few weeks ago, and they graciously allowed me to purchase one of the leftover bottles. Trust me, this stuff is not easy to find.) It comes in a sleeve, which allows you to keep it upside down, keeping that yeast plug intact.

To open it, obviously you have to disgorge the yeast plug. There's a heavy metal clamp holding the cork in;  you'll need a screwdriver or something to pry it off. But be careful--the INSTANT that metal clamp is pried off, the cork will shoot out and you'll have a fountain of expensive sparkling rose all over your floor. Be sure to have enough presence of mind to pull the bottle upright immediately.

I got a fair amount all over my floor, but it was quite a show. The wine itself was lovely--deep, complex, faintly bready. Definitely the best sparkling anything I've ever had. (Which, granted, is not an especially wide category.)

And getting wine all over my living room was never so much fun.

Whole baked tilapia with potatoes, fennel, and sausage

The centerpiece of Saturday's dinner party was whole baked tilapia with potatoes, fennel, and two kinds of sausage. One whole fish per person, plus wine. Not including the wine, here's what I spent:

One package of 8 frozen whole tilapia at Sam's Club: $12.78
One bulb of fennel: $2.34
Several potatoes, from a 10-lb bag (cost of 10 lbs: $3 at Aldi): 50 cents?
One package of alligator sausage, the last from our New Orleans trip: $4.99
One package of andouille sausage: $3.99
One 2-lb block of feta at Sam's Club, for the appetizer: $8.79, and I used half, so let's say 4.79
Part of a jar of roasted red peppers: maybe 50 cents
One duck breast, for duck proscuitto, for appetizer: $4.79
Ingredients for dried apricot and pistachio ice cream, for dessert: less than $5, including cream

For a grand total of $39.68. Less than $40, to feed 8 people. Awesome.

Now, on to the fish recipe:

I used this recipe from Saveur as a starting point. I substituted tilapia for the red snapper, and used the same amount of stuff (potatoes, fennel, sausage), only for 8 fish instead of one. I lined two roasting pans with foil, laid four tilapia in each one, and scattered potatoes, fennel, uncooked sausage, and a few lemon slices for good measure around each pan. I threw in a couple of cans of canned clams, with juice, instead of the whole clams. Generous sprinkling of salt, and a drizzle of dry vermouth (since I didn't have any white wine). I roasted for 45 minutes (since there were 8 fish instead of 1).


1 large bulb fennel

Kosher salt, to taste
1 lb.  potatoes, in chunks
7 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
1 lb. fresh linguiça or kielbasa, cut into 1⁄4"-thick slices (I added another 1 lb of alligator sausage)8 cleaned whole tilapia2 lemons, sliced 1⁄2 cup white wine or dry vermouth
2 cans of clams, with juice
Salt and pepper to taste

Boil potatoes until half-cooked and drain.  Heat oven to 475˚.  Line a baking sheet  (or two) with an 18" x 24" sheet of heavy-duty foil. Transfer fish to foil. Stuff cavities of fish with fennel fronds. Roughly slice fennel bulb, and arrange fennel, potatoes, sausages, and clams around fish; sprinkle with salt and pepper. Drizzle with wine. Put an 18" x 24" piece of foil over top. Crimp edges together to form a packet. 

Roast for 35–40 minutes. Cut into foil; carefully pull back edges.  Serve.

Baked feta with roasted red peppers

Roasting feta takes a lot of the tang out of it, and makes it taste much richer and creamier. So essentially you can start with a really cheap-ass block of cheese and make it taste like something amazing, merely by adding heat.

There aren't even any additional ingredients. Take a block of feta, and cut it into large cubes, one for each person. Drizzle a little olive oil in the bottom of a cast-iron skillet. Place the blocks in the skillet, add sliced roasted red peppers (I used the jarred kind), and drizzle more olive oil over the top.

That's it. Roast at 400 degrees for, oh, let's say, 10 minutes or so. Until they're hot and beginning to brown.

Serve immediately, with crackers or bread.

Dinner party and a wine: Silver Lake 2008 Reserve Chardonnay

So, last weekend's dinner party recap: cream of celery soup; panzanella; crawfish etouffee; and apple pie with homemade vanilla ice cream for dessert.

I accidentally stumbled upon a very delicious wine pairing: this Silver Lake 2008 Reserve Chardonnay with the crawfish etouffee. My What to Drink with What You Eat told me that New World chardonnays would pair splendidly with crawfish, so I went to my wine shelf and selected this bottle, from Washington.

When I served the crawfish, we finished off the last of the sauvignon blanc we'd had with the first two courses, and I poured the chardonnay. A few bites into the etouffee, I took a sip.

Wow. When wines pair correctly, they really pair--both the food and the wine are suddenly more than they were. The sweetness in the wine brought out the taste of the crawfish, and the spices in the etouffee brought out the floral notes in the wine.

Not bad for an under-$20 bottle of wine.

Dinner party

I had this awesome dinner party last weekend, full of summer goodness. We had the caprese salad, above, with tomatoes and basil from my very own garden; the watermelon gazpacho, below (added bonus: add some tequila, and this would make a killer Bloody Mary--err, Bloody Maria, as I believe it's called with tequila).

Plus a gruyere souffle and zucchini cake for dessert.

Good friends, good food, a couple bottles of good wine. On a beautiful summer evening. Life doesn't get much better than that.

Saturday's dinner party and menu

I had some friends over for dinner Saturday night, and I wanted to cook something (well, many things) special for them. But I also didn't want to/couldn't afford to go out and buy a bunch of stuff. So I needed to put together a fancy menu based on what I already had.

Here's what I came up with:

Morel crostini (I have a crap-ton of fresh morels in the fridge; all I needed to complete the recipe was a loaf of Italian bread and a leek)

Scallops seared on the salt block (a special request to see the salt block in action)

Linguine with Italian sausage ragu

Salad (I still have a bunch of greenery that my mom gave me from her garden last weekend, plus a jar of her homemade plum vinaigrette)

Grapefruit-Campari sorbet

Zucchini cake with lemon glaze

Wine

Believe it or not, the only things I had to purchase for this menu were the scallops and the loaf of Italian bread and leek. I already had all the other things. (And I probably could have substituted a shallot for the leek.)

My CSA boxes provided me with salad greenery, zucchini and grapefruit; my pantry supplied me with lemons, onions, garlic, linguine, canned tomatoes, and baking stuff (flour, sugar, etc.); my freezer had Italian sausage purchased in bulk; my mom also provided me with a bag of fresh herbs, which will go into everything; and the liquor cabinet gave me the wine and Campari.

That's the beauty of a well-stocked kitchen; you can pull together any kind of meal you feel like. Simple, fancy, one person, 10 people, it doesn't matter. In fact, I normally wouldn't have bothered with purchasing the bread and the scallops--I would just rejigger the menu until I had one composed entirely of stuff I already had.

The main course, linguine with Italian sausage ragu, cost all of $1.66 per person. THAT'S the beauty of shopping in bulk. Even with the cost of the morels and scallops, the total cost was well under $5 per person. (The flowers came from my front yard, believe it or not.)

And it had been a while since I'd seen these friends. We had a great time. Isn't there some way I can just throw dinner parties for a living?

Dinner party: what I had and how much it cost

I had the neighbors over for dinner last weekend, providing me with my first opportunity for a dinner party in the new house. (I say "dinner party," even though it was really just four adults having dinner.)

It was quite lovely, and I'll be posting new recipes this week from that--including the big hit, seared scallops on a salt block.

It wasn't quite a $20 dinner party, but I wasn't trying for that, either. A lot of the vegetables came from my CSA box, so it's hard to accurately gauge the true cost of this dinner. I give market approximations, below. I didn't count the cost of flour, sugar, olive oil or spices.

Roasted chicken: $8 for two at Costco, so $4

Dandelion green salad with walnuts: $3 for dandelion greens, approximately 75 cents for a handful of walnuts from bulk bag ($11 for 2 pounds)

Roasted green beans: $2 for green beans, 50 cents for one shallot, 50 cents for handful of sliced almonds

Sweet potato buttermilk rolls: $1 for 2 sweet potatoes, $1.50 worth of buttermilk, $1 worth of fresh yeast, 11 cents for one egg ($4 for 36 eggs at Costco), $1 for one stick of butter

Seared scallops: $10.22 for 8 sea scallops from Whole Foods

Potatoes fried in duck fat and truffle oil: $3 for bag of new potatoes, $1 worth of duck fat ($5 for tub), $1 worth of truffle oil ($10 for small bottle)

Chocolate mousse: $3 for 1 bar Ghirardelli 60% chocolate, 3 eggs at 11 cents each

Wine: 2 bottles plus half a bottle of dessert wine, all gifts

Total cost: around $34 for four people, or $8.50 each.

$8.50 for that menu ain't bad at all.

Notice that if I'd eliminated the scallops, I would have come in very close to $20 total.

My weekly CSA box runs about $29 (during the summer, that will drop to $20). All the vegetables from the dinner, including the potatoes and sweet potatoes, came from the CSA boxes.

Which means that except for the scallops and the buttermilk, I had everything I needed for this dinner already. The chicken, the vegetables, the chocolate, everything. If you look at it that way, the dinner only cost me $14 and change out of pocket (for the scallops and the buttermilk).

As a side note, I really love entertaining. It was great to sit and relax with fellow adults, talking and drinking wine and eating good food. I want to do more of that.

It was also the first time that much of my dinnerware got pressed into service: serving platters and bowls, different kinds of wine glasses, the good napkins and tablecloth, matching candles. Not to mention the salt block. I've spent years slowly accumulating sets of 12: china, silverware, espresso cups, white wine glasses, red wine glasses, dessert wine glasses, champagne flutes, ramekins, you name it. Now that I finally have a table that will seat 12, it's time to put all that stuff to good use.

Blog meet-and-greet!

For readers in the Boston area, I'll be hosting my first official housewarming party next Saturday, February 5. I'd love to meet you! If you're interested, email me at brokefoodie@hotmail.com for details.

For those who can't make it, I'll be testing a new sangria recipe, which I'll be sure to post.

The $20 Dinner Party

Between the new job and the new house, I haven’t had much time (or inclination) to cook lately. I threw together two big vats of soup this past Sunday; that plus an econo-sized tub of salad greens will get the two of us through the week, easily, meaning I don’t have to worry about cooking when I get home this week. Which is good, because now that I live in the ‘burbs and have to ride the commuter rail, and then walk from there, it’s usually 7 pm before I get home.


Anyway. That does leave me with a problem vis-à-vis this blog, as I don’t have any new and exciting recipes to throw out right now. Mostly I’m just making the old standbys, with what’s in the pantry. (I haven’t gone grocery shopping since we moved in.)

So I’m throwing out this concept to see what you guys think: The $20 Dinner Party.

In which I put together a dinner party for 8 people, total food costs under $20. Total, not per person. (Obviously that will not include booze, just food; the booze budget could easily run two or even three times that, depending on whether I had wine pairings with each course.)

Plus, I’d cook it in front of everyone; a dinner party and cooking class in one. You could see how to maximize a budget like that, and take the recipes home with you. We’re not talking vats of soup, either; a multi-course full dinner, with fresh seasonal ingredients.

What do you think? Would you come to something like that? Would you be willing to pay some nominal amount (say, $5 plus alcohol) per person? Leave a comment and let me know what you think!