An Elegant Winter Dinner Menu

You may remember I mentioned a couple of posts ago that we were going to have our neighbors over for dinner. That was now a little over a week ago but I wanted to go back and post the menu because it turned out so wonderfully! Here's the menu, with links to the recipes on Epicurious:

Cornish Game Hens with Cranberry and Thyme Sauce

Creamy Polenta 

Roasted Root Vegetables with Rosemary

Green Beans with Herb Butter 

Herb Green Salad with Pomegranate Vinaigrette, Avocados, Dried Cranberries, and Goat Cheese

Apple Galettes

Everything turned out perfectly and I would highly recommend the entire menu for a special dinner. It was a bit of work though, so plan to spend an entire afternoon in the kitchen. 

Usually I plan my menus, read through the recipes, and create my shopping list. After I purchase the ingredients, I don't think too much more about the preparations until two to three hours before dinner time. However, after numerous dinner parties I have learned that cooking fairly complex meals always takes much much longer than I have anticipated. This leaves me frantically running around like a crazy person when the guests arrive and everyone is starving by the time dinner is actually ready and on the table. I am always so upset with myself when dinner is late and it is always such a hassle when our small kitchen is filled to overflowing with dirty dishes even before dinner starts. Last Wednesday as I was getting ready for dinner with our neighbors, I decided to try a new method to see if I could actually get dinner ready on time. 

Once I had all the ingredients, I sat down with my recipes (early in the morning) and made a note of how long I thought each one would take - for preparation and for baking/cooking time. Then I added about 5 to 10 extra minutes for each step to give myself a little bit of wiggle room. Next, I calculated the time by which I wanted to be able to sit down to dinner and worked back from there, making myself a timeline to follow as I got dinner ready. Since several of the items would need to cook or bake right until the last minute, I tried to do as much as possible early in the afternoon so I could focus on those items in the last hour before dinner. Below are my notes for the day. It didn't turn out exactly as I had planned, but it helped a great deal. 

Early preparations to be completed between 1pm and 5pm:

Assemble the galettes and refrigerate them (be ready to bake them after dinner so they will be fresh and hot for dessert) - 30 minutes 

Make the caramel sauce for the galettes - 30 minutes 

Set the table - 15 minutes 

Prepare the Roast Vegetables side dish - 30 minutes to prep the veggies and 1 hour 30 minutes for baking time 

Make the herb butter for the green beans - 10 minutes

Prepare the ingredients for the game hens' sauce - 10 minutes 

Wash and cut up the green beans - 20 minutes 

Total prep time: 2 

hours 25 minutes 

Be sure to start these tasks by 3pm 

Dinner Timeline for the late afternoon:

5:35pm - start preparing the game hens, preheat the oven to 450 degrees

5:45pm - start the polenta 

5:50pm - start the game hen sauce 

6:10pm - put on the water for the green beans 

6:35pm - Cornish game hens should be done, prepare

 green salad 

6:40pm - put the roasted veggies back into the oven to reheat at 450 degrees 

6:45pm - the polenta should be finished 

6:50pm - plate the game hens and polenta 

6:55pm - put the roast veggies on the table 

7:00pm - sit down to the table and eat 

In reality the galettes took a lot longer to prep than I had anticipated (I should have allowed them 45 minutes to an hour) and I didn't start my prep work until closer to 4pm. However, it all worked out well and we were ready to sit down and eat by 7:15pm which was just about the time our company arrived. This was so much better than my previous dinner-party experiences that I will definitely be using my new method in the future. 

Here are some pictures from my cooking adventures. Sadly I was so preoccupied with cooking later in the day that I didn't get around to taking any pictures of the game hens. Oh well, I'll have to try for that next time. 

My all time favorite salad! Greens tossed with olive oil,

pomegranate vinaigrette, salt, and pepper. Topped with goat cheese

dried cranberries, and avocado slices. Yum Yum!

Chopped up root veggies.

Washing leeks in the sunshine!

Mixing up the vegetables, oil, rosemary, and salt.

Into the oven!

Yummy roasted root vegetables all ready to eat! 

~ElizabethRose

Catching Up...

The above picture is one of my favorite parts of my bedroom. The flowers in the picture are a kind of large counted cross stitch. I discovered the framed cross stitch at the Alameda Flea Market last summer for just $25. I fell in love with it right away despite the small amount of water damage. I just love the color combination and the beautiful roses. Hopefully one day it will end up on the wall but for now I think it looks lovely on top of my dresser.

Well, I was sadly very delinquent in my blog postings last week. That was because I was out of the house from 7am till 6pm each day attending a course on Breastfeeding Counselor Training put on by The Center for Breastfeeding with The Healthy Children Project. It was a great course and I hope to be able to use the information I learned through volunteering in the community.

In other exciting news from last week. On Sunday night (the 22nd) we had our friend Becca over for dinner. She brought some lovely potatoes and we cooked the dinner together which was lots of fun. I found some new recipes to try on Epicurious and they all turned out fantastically! I think I may have discovered my new favorite menu! Here's what we made (the links take you to the actual recipes on Epicurious):

Cedar Planked Salmon with Maple Glaze

Mustard Mashed Potatoes

Lacinato Kale and Ricotta Salata Salad
Apple Galettes with Caramel Sauce

Here's a picture of the salmon before it went into the oven. It's sitting on a cedar plank that we had picked up in Bellingham, Washington (my home town) last year when we visited. I hadn't ever used it before so I was very excited to try it out. The salmon is resting on some scallion greens and has been brushed with a ginger maple glaze - Yum!! It came out perfectly and was absolutely delicious!

To serve the salmon we put some of the mustard mashed potatoes on our plates, piled the salmon on top, and drizzled the whole thing with more ginger maple glaze! Yum, yum! The mashed potatoes were great and weren't too mustardy which I was worried about initially.

After dinner we made the Apple Galettes and their Caramel Sauce. It was my first experience working with puff pastry which I had found frozen at the grocery store. I was a little nervous about it but it turned out to be very easy to use. Here's a picture of the galettes right before we put them in the oven:

We baked them much longer than the recipe called for - perhaps 30 to 40 minutes but perhaps that was because our apple slices were a bit thick. When they finally came out of the oven they were a lovely golden color and smelled divine! I put them on the special dessert plates my mom gave me several years ago and we drizzled them with their caramel sauce (also divine!) and plopped a scoop of vanilla ice cream on the top. The results looked and tasted amazing! This is definitely my new favorite dessert. It wasn't too hard to make and looked and tasted just like something from a fancy restaurant (or possibly better!). I would definitely recommend them! They also have some almond paste in the middle of the galette under the apples which really adds to the flavor. Here's a picture of the final product just before we dug in:


The other big thing to report from last week was the addition of a new member to our small family. It turned out the Valicia did indeed need someone to look after Leila, her adorable kitty, while she is working in Korea for the next few months. Leila arrived on Saturday the 21st and has been gradually getting used to her new surroundings. She is such a lovely kitty and is very companionable. The first day she was quite shy and scared but she has really warmed up to us over the past week and is now quite comfortable running around the house. The only thing that still scares her is Woodley's harp. We aren't quite sure what the problem is with the harp, but every time Woodley starts practicing, she runs for the bedroom to hide.

Isn't she cute!

Valicia and David came over to visit her last Tuesday and brought us dinner which they fixed up over here. That was such a lovely treat because I was exhausted from my class and didn't have any energy too cook. The meal was wonderful and it was so nice to get to spend some time with them. Leila also loved the visit and was so happy to see them both.

It is so nice to have a cat around the house and Leila is a great companion. Right now she is curled up on my desk, just to the left of my keyboard. I think she wants to help with the blogging! I'll work on getting some more pictures of her to share in the next few days.

Now, to finish up, here are a few notes from last weekend:

Friday I finished with my class. In the evening we met up with Woodley's parents for dinner before going to see a silent movie at The California Theater in San Jose. It was a great night and it was such a treat to hear The Mighty Wurlitzer organ.

Saturday we headed up north to attend Woodley's great-aunt Audrey's Surprise 86th birthday party. We picked up Woodley's cousin on the way it was so nice to get to catch up with her. The party was very nice - Woodley and I danced a lot! and we had fun visiting with all the family. On the way home we dropped off Louise and went to Woodley's all time favorite restaurant for dinner - Ti Couz in San Francisco. I usually don't like going there very much because it is always quite crowded and noisy but it wasn't too bad that night.

Sunday we went to the Alameda Flea Market but didn't spend very long at it because it was a rainy day and there were only a few vendors set up. Since we finished much earlier than we had expected, we headed over to San Francisco and went to the newly renovated California Academy of Sciences. We didn't have too much time there so we only were able to explore the aquarium in the bottom level and the rain forest exhibit. The aquarium was by far our favorite. We hope to go back on a different day to see the Planetarium Show, the Living Roof, and the African Hall

This brings us to today, Monday.

I have a few to dos that I'm hoping I can get to today. Perhaps if I write them down here I'll be more motivated to get through them all. :)

1. Catch up on email from last week
2. Bake a loaf of whole wheat bread
3. Start gathering information about what we need to do to pay the California Use Tax
4. Wash and dry the linens
5. Clean the bathroom
6. Plan menus for today, Tuesday, and Wednesday
7. Go grocery shopping

I'll report back later!