Dinner for company - In three parts

A favorite part of our weekend is spending a long afternoon cooking and then having good friends come over to enjoy our (hopefully) good food.  There is an enjoyment in the planning, anticipation and execution, which is separate and apart from the pure enjoyment of eating with good company.  The tactile sensation of cutting an onion and the audible sizzle when it hits hot butter in a pan... these are the flowers that we stop and smell.

This weekend we had dinner, respectively, with good friends Friday, Saturday, and Sunday... but we only cooked that meal on Sunday.  So here it is!


The dinner consisted of 3 parts, and a beverage. We made a roasted red bell pepper soup, a chicken dish entitled "Country Captain," Portuguese tarts, and a white sangria.  (Unfortunately, the soup and chicken recipes are out of recipe books that do not choose to publish online.)


The Soup:

This is a roasted red bell pepper soup we have made many times over the years, and it comes from a cook book we received as a wedding gift.  It is basically my wife's favorite soup.   The key part of this soup, clearly, is roasted red bell peppers.  As it turns out, this is the messiest, most expensive, and most time consuming part of this recipe.  It occurred to me one time... roasted red bell peppers are cheaper and extraordinary more convenient if you buy them already roasted in a jar.  Once you eliminate that step, the soup basically amounts to chopping, sauteing in stages, adding chicken stock and pureeing.

The lineup: pears are the surprise ingredient here.

All good soups should start with a pot full of onions

Perfect recipe for a food processor: chop and puree!

Simmering to meld flavors.

Pureeing in batches

The end result, tastefully garnished with sour cream.

The Entree:

For the main course, we made a dish entitled "Country Captain."  This is, apparently, a South Carolina "low country" favorite.  We were introduced to this dish by way of Bobby Flay's absurd food challenge show "Throwdown," though we chose to make the Joy of Cooking version.  We were drawn to this recipe by the combination of spices combined with currants and raisins.

As with a majority of the chicken dishes we make, this one involved cutting a chicken into pieces, browning it and then building a flavorful base in which to simmer the pieces to completion.

The rogues gallery.  Chicken and stock not pictured.

A whole nutmeg and a microplane.  Freshly grated nutmeg is insanely potent.

A bit gory for some of you, but I can break a chicken into pieces
like nobody's business.  The backbone and wingtips go
into the freezer for the next batch of stock.

Lightly dredged in flour and browning.
For those of you keeping track, this is the maiden voyage
of our new 13 qt. le creuset.

The lovely Country Captain

And... we plate.

This dish was a hit, though as with all recipes, I'm learning that getting the right amount of salt is both crucial and difficult.  "Salt and pepper to taste" in a recipe drives me up the wall, but its clearly a taste  a good cook needs to learn to detect.  I felt this dish had great spice but lacked salt.  Everyone else seemed to like it just fine!

The vegetables:

Our friends brought the vegetable course, so I do not have access to the recipe, but it was a clean, simple dish of sauteed squash, zucchini and red bell pepper.  This is a combo I would have hated as a kid, but as an adult it is delicious, fulfilling and healthy.  Well done, friends.

The dessert:

This dessert seemed complicated on its face, but it was actually quite simple.  Some friends of ours previously made this dish, and we surreptitiously tried to take a picture of their cookbook and claim it as our own.  So, unfortuately, I don't really have a great link to a good recipe, but it's basically similar to this.
 

Store bought puff pastry, rolled up and then cut into 6 pieces

Place spirals in muffin tin and then flatten out

Making the custard.  We used orange zest instead of lemon

Bake until golden

Put it on a pretty plate

Deliciously gooey in the center!

 The beverage:

Chez Venza, for those of you who don't know, is located in Austin, Texas, which is encountering record heat with no hope of rain.  What better to quaff in such a sweltering arid clime, but a fruity white sangria?  Again, this is a favorite of my wife, and in making it, I didn't rely on one recipe in particular but looked at several and synthesized my own concoction (the linked recipe contains the formula closest to what I used.)

The key seems to be, a sweet-ish white wine (here sauvignon blanc), fresh fruits (here nectarine, peach, lemon and lime), brandy to keep the alcohol content up, and club soda to add some fizz.

The key here is a device called a mandolin:  it makes the thin, consistent cuts... just watch your fingers.

Frozen peaches from HEB are astoundingly good.  Kiss the guesswork goodbye.

Cold, delicious, and deadly.

 The drink was delightful.  Eating the remaining fruit, which seems to soak up liquor, is also quite nice.