Denny came to dinner

And that is that!  With last night's dinner, I

have come to the end of several days in a row with some sort of (admittedly fun) obligation.  Tonight will be a basic dinner and a quiet evening.  Oh, I have one more card to write.  Maybe that, too.

But first:  last night.  And a simple check in.  It was a nice dinner for four of us over at Van's.  Denny

came over from WeHo to join us.  We sipped cocktails that Van

whipped up for us - a tasty bourbon and cranberry one

for most of us while Conrad

had martinis.  I made chicken cacciatore and polenta for dinner, and for dessert some red wine poached pears that I served with chunks of toasted chocolate chip panettone. 

It was a nice handful of hours for us all.

There will be no blogging of the basic dinner tonight for you to read tomorrow!  🤣 

post-Christmas celebrations

It's been such a bizarre holiday season, and not the most Christmassy one ever.  I've whined about that already, I know.  Still, we're doing what we can to get a bit of celebration in.  Dinner out tonight, a movie and then Maestro tomorrow, and then NYE at Van's.  And then life will go back to normal eating.  I very much hope!

It's been lovely being home, getting some time to enjoy the tree and other decorations. 

The trappings of Christmas will be with us a little while yet, and that's a nice thing.  Oh, sure, it will be good to have things restored to normal at some point in January (or February - we'll see!).  For this week, at least, though, there is still some small sense of Christmas.  On the other hand, as is usual for me, I've essentially stopped playing the Christmas music.  I let it stretch to two nights ago, but that's it for me.

Two nights ago Van (and Olive) came over for dinner

and gift unwrapping.  Cocktails and little bites to start, then we had ourselves a meal of beef short ribs on a pea puree. 

Not too bad a meal, I think, but I still find that short ribs are never really as good as I want them to be.  We had some red wine from Epoch to go along with it.

After the main course, we opened gifts, including some treats for the little girl. 

How nice to get all the lovely things we did.  I'm very grateful to my guys as well as to the friends who sent us gifts as well.

Dessert followed:  a red-wine poached pear with buttermilk cake and a dollop of creme fraiche. 

Van headed out after that, we cleaned up, and it was off to bed.

Yesterday was another meal, but a little lower key.  We had invited our neighbour, Erik, to come over.  He'd been watching out for parcels and such for us as he always done, and with his son gone for the holidays, we thought it would be nice to thank Erik with a meal.  We also had a bottle of gin from The UP for him as a gift.  I made us pork chops slow cooked with onions and thyme,

and for dessert it was a buttermilk fruitcake with a bit of poached pear and the red wine syrup. 

A nice meal, but clearly I still have some jet lag.  As it closed in on 10:00, I was almost dropping to sleep in my chair, and I excused myself and went to bed.  Terribly rude of me, but I needed it.  Conrad kept Erik entertained another hour or so and cleaned up and came to bed himself.

Some good food the past few days.  Some nice company.  We've managed to get some things done around the condo as well, and more of that to come today and tomorrow.  First plan for today post-morning walk and coffee?  A massage.  My Christmas treat to myself.  😃

hotel garden

I can't overstate how much we liked our hotel in Torres del Paine, the Hotel Las Torres.  Oh, the rooms could have been more luxurious, perhaps, but they were certainly comfortable.  And the view?  Come on!  I've also commented on just how good the all-inclusive food was as well.  And here's a cool thing about that food: a lot of it was very very local indeed.

We had some time between breakfast and our long ride to El Calafate to walk around a bit, so Conrad and I found ourselves wandering into the hotel gardens. 

No, not exquisite beds of fragrant blooms, but a working vegetable garden.  Not to mention apples, pears, and plums in the orchard! 

We saw rhubarb and currant bushes and gooseberries, the source of ingredients for drinks and desserts.  We saw the carrots that were served with dinner dishes and adorned the lovely salads at lunch.  There were greenhouses as well.  Guests were welcome to walk through the area, and I can only hope it made people appreciate the hotel and its food all the more.

In addition, there was the little brewery. 

A small building standing near the garden entrance, it was the source of a beer that one of the Brits on our excursion the day before had raved about.  Jenny, who lives in Belgium (where they know a thing or two about beer) ordered one before dinner the night before, and she approved.  I just wonder whether there was the space in the there for distilling the gin they made!

all we need is a partridge

I was heading over to Starbucks a couple of days ago, and as I passed a courtyard building in the neighbourhood, this caught my eye.



Poor, forlorn, unpicked pears. I hate to see fruit left on trees (and I rather doubt the pears were being left to be bletted). On the other hand, the impending holiday season did spring to mind...

second Saturday dinner party in a row

It's just like old days around here: friends over, Conrad entertaining them, me feeding them. You'd never guess that our year has been so disrupted by personal and work travel. Two weekends in a row, and two Saturday night dinner parties for a small group of us, seated around the kitchen table. Sarah and Tim took a turn at our table last night.

Given all that's going on with us (and Conrad's work travel - he got back from Austin on Friday night and even as I type this on Sunday morning, he's on a plane to Honolulu), a simple dinner with little to be done while the guests are here is what we strive for. Even better for us, Sarah and Tim were delayed by the festival of lights or whatever it is down on Michigan Avenue. Well before they arrived we had the table set
(those are dried pomegranates in the bowl), wine ready, and both of us relaxed.

It's always great to see Sarah. I've known her for about half my life (and hers), and our conversation can get wildly out of hand if given a chance. Tim, a friend of hers from London, fit into the conversation well, and we had an especial chuckle when we pieced together that earlier in the day, as part of his research he's doing in town, he was visiting someone across the street from us but didn't recognize the same buildings and area when he arrived at our place for dinner.

We started out similarly to last Saturday - hey, if it works... - with some cheese, toasts, nuts, and a bottle of an Henriot Champagne Conrad and I had picked up in Paris in 2005. We'd intended at that time to use it for the holiday season that year, but somehow never did. So then, why not celebrate a friend being in town?

While they munched, I got Sarah to come into the kitchen to take photos of the dinner: roasted brined Cornish game hen with parsnip and leek puree, Brussels sprouts, and a white wine and white port reduction. They birds cooked up nicely enough, I think. Meanwhile, I've taken the leftover puree and used it in place of potatoes for individual shepherd's pies for dinners in the days ahead. With the hens we drank down a bottle of a Quails' Gate Pinot Noir. It tasted a little young to me, and I wonder if we might have been well served picking up a Beaujolais Nouveau instead. Ah well.

Sarah also photographed the desserts for me as I plated them, then I took a turn with the camera.
I served pears poached in red wine with rosemary butter cookies, Roquefort cheese, and poaching syrup. The poaching syrup also had rosemary flavouring it, and the echo of that in the cookies appealed to me. Sarah had thoughtfully brought over a bottle of a Quails' Gate ice wine, and we enjoyed that with the dessert.

After that, onward to midnight when they left, we sat in the kitchen,
munching some of the Moorish Delight biscotti and a wedge of Cypress Grove Midnight Moon goat's milk cheese. By this point we were mostly drinking water, and I now kind of think coffee would have been good. No matter. Tim had brought us some gorgeous chocolate-dipped candied orange slices from Switzerland, where he works. We gladly dug into those before sending them off in a cab and getting ourselves to bed.

Not a bad dinner, then. I'm in the kitchen today, preparing things for tonight's swim team banquet, but I will happily dine out through much of the week ahead. I need a bit of a break now and again, of course!

Pears

Ah, pears. The fruit that, if weren't for me, Dominic would still not know the pleasure of. I sometimes wonder why they're not more popular, and then I bring one in with my lunch and end up having to clean pear skin and juice off of everything. Delicate when ripe! Stick with apples for lunches!

Tonight, though, it's pears. Rather, it's all for tomororw when a few friends come for dinner. I'm getting some prep out of the way today so that tomorrow will be easier to deal with. I have crepe batter in the fridge (and I may make those up before swimming) and a bowl of a tomato saffron sauce that is meant to go with the crepes. Bread, salad, the rabbit, a cake - all these will come tomorrow instead.

The main event tonight are my pears, however. Karen Barnaby has a a couple of recipes for poaching them in her Pacific Passions cookbook, and though I've made the ones poached in Riesling and served with basil crème anglaise (a great base for ice cream, by the way), I prefer the red wine poached pears.

Ahhhh, the scent even now is maddening. I've poached the pears, and now I'm boiling down the poaching liquid into a thick syrup. I'll keep the pears in it until dinner tomorrow, turning them, basting them, burnishing them. I have modified the recipe, I admit. The first time I made it I forgot to put in the whole cloves, just didn't see them listed. No matter. I've never bothered with them in subsequent instances. Instead, the red wine syrup is redolent of the fresh rosemary, cinnamon (the real stuff, curled up like parchment, a light citrusy scent), and black peppercorns. I make a simple cake to serve alongside because the poaching liquid/syrup deserves something to sop it up.

I'll try to take photos of the dinner tomorrow if things turn out. The syrup is almost done. I believe I shall get to bed at a reasonable hour tonight.