Friends for Dinner

We're finally settling in to the point where we can start entertaining again. So, Annie invited Valerie and Michael over to dinner. Michael's our insurance agent and Valerie and Ann had connected via a women's group to which they both belong. Long story short, Ann invited them over and let me run with a menu, mostly. She wanted to reprise the mushroom crostini that we had at New Year's Eve and I decided to keep dinner itself very simple: focaccia, an arugula salad, and porchetta. And a little plate to accompany a bottle of Port for dessert.

Thanks to Valerie for taking some of the photos below and giving me permission to use them here. Go have a look at her blog, V. Estelle Travel. It was so awesome to have someone else take pictures for once, but it looks like we both forgot to take people shots and bottle shots! Oh well, you'll have to trust us that a good time happened!

Chanterelle, Shiitake, Leek, and Taleggio Crostini

I couldn't find dried porcini to make the crostini, so I went with fresh chanterelles, which given all the rain we have had, were in really good shape. We had a bottle of Prosecco with the crostini.

Grinding Pork Trimmings for Sausage

I'm still looking for a good supplier of pork. Alas, the best I have found so far is from Carlton Farms out where we used to live in Yamhill, but it is definitely not the Berkshire and Ossabaw x Berkshire I was used to working with in Virginia.

"Porchetta" Ready for the Oven

I would really have preferred to make my porchetta with a suckling pig or a side of pork belly, but that would have been overkill for a dinner for four. So I faked it by butterflying a top loin and stuffing with a fennel sausage that I ground from rib and belly trimmings.

Slicing the Porchetta

Focaccia and Barbaresco

Focaccia has got to be the world's simplest bread to make. I started it first thing in the morning with a very tiny amount of yeast and cold water and let it rise all day. The first rise took about seven hours. We served Barbaresco with dinner and Michael and Valerie brought a wonderfully rustic Chianti Classico that we had as a second bottle.

Annie Making the Salad Dressing

Arugula with Clementines, Red Onion, Pine Nuts, and Ricotta Salata

Valerie's Plate with Salsa Verde on the Porchetta

I love a sharp salsa verde with pork to help offset the fat. This was parsley, anchovy, garlic, capers, red wine vinegar, and olive oil, all chopped together by hand for texture.

Blue Cheese, Candied Hazelnuts, Dates, Pinot Noir Syrup

For dessert, I had a bottle of Port that I helped blend at the winery and so I threw together a really simple port plate of Gorgonzola-like local blue cheese, local hazelnuts that I candied earlier in the afternoon, a pitted Medjool date, crostini from my focaccia, and a red wine syrup that I made from over-the-hill remnants of Pinot Noir from the tasting room.

This was the first time, other than Thanksgiving, that I have really cooked a nice meal start to finish since I left the restaurant back in August. It felt really good to get back in the saddle again and I really enjoyed getting head down in the kitchen again to knock out all the components of this dinner. It's not like the restaurant where we would have premade batches of salsa verde, salad dressing, candied nuts, crostini, or red wine syrup ready to hand. In that sense, it was an awful lot of fun to create a dinner totally from scratch. And an awful lot of fun to share it with Michael and Valerie.