red capsicum soup
saltimbocca
polenta
grilled mushrooms, asparagus and zucchini
beetroot, pine nuts, goat's fetta and rocket salad
chocolate cream pudding on meringue nests
Last week a friend asked me to cook dinner for his birthday as he wanted to eat at home instead of dining out at a restaurant. Lovely idea. I asked the questions of how many people - 5. Good start, as is this was the first time I was really cooking for them a small number is not so daunting, particularly as the house we were going to be dining at did not have the kitchen finished just yet - no stove or oven. No dramas.
Back to the questions I needed to ask. Do you have anything you are allergic to or don't like to eat - not fond of olives, not so much chilli and that's all. Good, going well here. Is there something you would particularly like for dinner - fish. Great, I will cook veal for you.
Here I was going to write that I love the planning stage of a dinner party. Yes, I do but I also love the shopping, the preparation, the putting together, the actual eating of the dinner and the relaxation after. And, naturally, I love the comments of friends that they enjoyed the food!
Back to last night's dinner.
The red capsicum soup came from Giuliano Bugialli's 'Foods of Tuscany' cookbook. I have cooked things from this book before and they always work. I had confidence in cooking something new and the soup was delicious.
One question I would like to find out the answer for - the capsicum was cut into small dice and soaked in water for half an hour. Can anyone help with the answer?
The secret to the soup was following the instructions to pass the cooked ingredients through the mouli, not to use a blender. This is an easy answer to the why - the mouli does not allow any skins to pass through and therefore you have purely the flesh of the vegetables in the soup. (A mouli is also good for mashed potatoes, even slightly better than a potato ricer)
The soup was enjoyed by all - comments being to add a little chilli and/or anchovies. My particular way of cooking is to cook it first as the recipe and get the feel of the dish before I experiment with adding flavours. As I am a chilli and anchovy lover, these will definitely be tried in the next cooking of this dish.
In the main course, the saltimbocca ws overshadowed by the polenta and vegetables. I do despair of purchasing good veal in this town for the escalopes. This was seriously the last time I will attempt to do this. The prosciutto that is available from our major delicatessen is excellent and there was fresh sage at the supermarket/ The dish was not a failure but not as good as I have made it before and certainly nowhere as good as I have eaten.
The polenta was fantastic. Even the fast cooking polenta that we now buy still needs time spent at the stove cooking and stirring continuously for that creamy fluffy texture. Not such an easy task to do in the heat and humidity of a Darwin afternoon but well worth the steamed up glasses, the sweat running down your back. Once cooked, with the addition of real butter and grated Reggiano parmesan, I poured it into a stainless steel tray to cool and set. This was cut into pieces and panfried in olive oil before serving. CCrunchy crust and creamy inside, delicious.
Several years ago I purchased a large oval cast iron grill pan that I could use on top of the very ordinary electric stove I have to cook on where I live. This fits over two elements and is what I used to cook the vegetables. Because of the limitations of the kitchen at the house I was going to, I cooked the vegetables at home at 3 pm. As the vegetables were cooked I placed them immediately in the serving dish, wrapped the dish tightly in cling wrap when the last pieces were cooked. Just before serving I sprinkled some white balsamic over the top. The vegetables had retained the lovely chargrilled flavour and looked pretty as a picture with the stripes from ridged grill pan.
The chocolate pudding part of the dessert came from a newly purchased book that I wasn't sure that I could trust the recipes. After making making the chocolate pudding I am still not sure that I can trust these recipes, use them as a guide yes, but trust my intuition as well. The pudding did work as I folded whipped cream through it and replaced the recommended marsala with Amaretto liqueur. The recipe used 4 egg yolks as a starter, so I made a meringue with the egg whites. If they worked, all is good; if they didn't work it was only my time that was lost. The first cooking of them wasn't so successful, crisp on the outside and not cooked inside. I turned the oven off and put them back in. This didn't do much and after an hour I turned the oven back on to 120 degrees. I forgot about them until I was packing everything up to load the car. Taking them out of the oven they now looked over cooked! Something made me throw a clean teatowel over the top of the tray and take them anyway. They were delicious - crisp but fall apart in your mouth, a perfect vehicle for the rich chocolate cream draped over the top.
All round a successful dinner party with the guests eating dishes that they may not have chosen in a restaurant and enjoyed them, dishes that brought about discussion on techniques of cooking, dishes that evoked memories of comfort food.
