Had Mary and the delightfully cute baby Charlie over for dinner last night. What did I make?
1) Salmon with a dill seed/fennel seed crust. Both the salmon and the spice blend were gifts from David’s sister, Mary Alice, who moved to Alaska earlier this year. I roasted the salmon on a bed of lemon slices.
2) Kale with apples, garlic and sage. This is my standby side dish right now. It’s too easy to make and I even finished it off in the oven while the fish was cooking
3) orange chevre risotto. This was delicious. zest and juice 2 navel oranges. Using a standard risotto recipe do this: add 1/3 of the orange zest to the pot when you toss the rice in to cook, before you add the liquid. The first shot of liquid should be the orange juice, the second should be a good slug of white wine and then use broth or whatever for the rest of the cooking. To finish, add 2 ounces of chevre and the rest of the orange zest. it was absolutely delicious.
3) a variation on the figgy pear parnouti in which I made a regular caramel sauce and added 1 tablespoon of fresh grated ginger, 1 tsp cinnamon and cardamom, 1/2 tsp allspice, 1/4 tsp cloves and a pinch of nutmeg. I divided the chopped pears, figs, walnuts and chevre into 6 ounce ramekins and poured the caramel sauce over them. I roasted them at 325 for 45 minutes. the leftover caramel sauce hardened like candy, so I got to spend the afternoon sucking on little chunks of spicy ginger caramel.
You should come to dinner some time!