Saturday, September 19, 2009

Dinner Party! Pesto, Quiche, Cobbler, Cheese.

As a reward for a productive rehearsal of a musical number for an upcoming Amnesty party, we had a bit of a feast last night. A made fresh pesto with a recipe from Jamie Oliver's Italian cookbook - all amounts are in "handfuls" which is funny when you think about the different sizes of hands in the world, but it was very tasty. Up next was a spinach and mushroom quiche - my first attempt at making pie dough seemed to turn out ok even though the food processor broke in the middle of the process. The filling was just chopped spinach (the frozen stuff is easy), sliced button mushrooms, spring onions, and four eggs with a bit of milk. It was a rather intense green color as the picture above shows, but tasted really nice. Plum and blueberry cobbler for dessert, made by modifying this recipe - one punnet of plums and one punnet of blueberries, mixed with sugar, cinnamon and flour (instead of cornstarch). Then doubled the cobbler dough recipe (which was very runny, I don't understand how you're supposed to make little rounds of cobbler dough - instead I had to pour the batter over the whole dish). Baked for 35 minutes - it was lovely and not too sweet.
But the real star of the evening is thanks to J&A, who sent us the most ridiculous cheese selection from Neal's Yard Dairy as a gift. The picture above is only about 1/3 of the cheese that arrived - from the top left, there's Doddington (a bit like Comte), Wensleydale (so much better than any of the Wensleydale I've had before from the supermarket, it's almost creamy rather than crumbly), Harbourne Blue (sadly I still hate blue cheese, but everyone else loved it), Milleens (soft, slightly stinky cheese that is GREAT) and Ragstone (soft goat's cheese, one of my favorites). This magnificent cheeseboard also came with England Preserves Red Onion Marmalade (consensus among the others was that this was really good as I am not a fan of condiments) and Stockan & Gardens Thin Oatcakes (perfect as a cheese vehicle). Thanks J&A!

No comments:

Post a Comment