We had a little dinner party yesterday, one of those dinner parties that keeps getting smaller and smaller because some of the hosts are not coordinated about inviting people, and some of the guests had other commitments or illness crop up.
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We had a small, simple meal: mixed greens salad with (gasp!) store Italian dressing, seaweed soup, crab and mushroom tortellini, then some nice cheeses with apple tart.
I made the tortellini: mostly crab (it's crab season here and I found some lovely crab meat at the Ferry Market) but some with chantarelle mushrooms because I wasn't sure whether one of our guests was vegetarian or not. The mushroom ones were a bit anaemic; I filled them out with ricotta, but I really should have made them solid mushroom to contrast with the crab. The crab ones were absolutely awesome. There's nothing like good, fresh ingredients.
The pasta part of the tortellini was a bit thick. Somewhere along the line my pasta machine disappeared, so when I make pasta now it's by hand, and I was being a bit clumsy with the rolling pin when I was cooking (or rather, impatient). So it tasted great (like fresh pasta ought to) but was a bit thick, as I said.
The crust on the tart was amazing. It was the cream cheese crust from Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Pie and Pastry Bible and yeah, it was excellent. Perfectly buttery flavoured, perfect texture, amazing. And super-easy to make. I recommend.
So, nice small dinner party, a chance to experiment with some recipes, and a reason to get the two parlours in usable shape slightly earlier than the usual open house hysterics, due to begin early this coming week.
