Epic Dinner Party

This can be a difficult time of year. Now when we’re really anxious for spring to begin, we got our first snow. There are times I just don’t know what to do with myself. Also, we’re coming to an end to our major entertaining season, which is winter. Soon landscaping season will begin and Steve will work late and arrive home exhausted. We will eat lovely dinners on the porch but slow down on inviting guests.

It was time for an epic dinner party. I was especially excited because I had ordered a cavatelli maker, which was scheduled to arrive on Friday. I couldn’t wait to make pasta. This is all part of my continued adventures with Frankies Spuntino, a Brooklyn (and Manhattan) restaurant that issued a cookbook I got for Christmas. It is full of amazing Italian dishes, including the braciole I wrote about earlier.

A pasta dinner would also take care of some final products of the summer garden. I have pesto in the freezer, a couple of jars of tomato sauce and two butternut squashes. With the addition of three kinds of local mushrooms (oyster, shiitake and crimini) from the local market and Italian sausage from the meat market, I was set!

First I made a batch of my soft cheese with herbs de Provence. The day before I also diced up the squash. I tested the cavatelli machine with a simple dough made from flour, salt and hot water. Seriously. That’s it. The resulting, dense shell-like tubes were so delicious I couldn’t believe it. They are more like gnocchi than ordinary pasta, and the grooves hold the sauce.

Saturday morning I made the bean dip, also from Frankies Spuntino. It is simply a can of white beans, parsley, an anchovy and capers, lemon juice and olive oil. Steve made a batch of dinner rolls. I also decided then to make the ricotta from scratch for the ricotta cavatelli. It just takes an hour (it actually took me two) and the only ingredients are milk and citric acid.

The resulting ricotta was gorgeous. That afternoon I dumped it into the mixer with an egg, salt and flour (half semolina and half all-purpose) and mixed it with the dough hook. While it sat I chopped up an onion and the mushrooms, combined them with the squash and some oil and the last of the garden rosemary and oregano for roasting.

It was the most beautiful dough ever, springy and moist enough to work with. If anything, it was too nice, and was hard to roll into ropes because it kept springing back! I ended up rolling most of it out and cutting it in strips.

The key is to not roll it too thin. The machine likes the dough about 3/8 inch thick, and squeezes, rolls and cuts it in a single motion. Macaroni!!

An hour before the guests arrived, I put in the veggies and set out the wine and hors d’oeuvre. They brought olives, which was a great addition, and flan for dessert (it was an ovo-lactarian dream!)

We invited Annie and Tim from the farm and our friends Susan and Alex and Susan’s brother Scott. They have their own “family compound” not too far away and have gotten more into farming than we have. Recently they had major trauma with their four female goats, all of whom gave birth a couple of weeks ago. I saw Scott at the “Life in the Avon Hills” conference and he told me the horrors of it– only two kids lived, one mother died (never dilated) and the other two mothers wouldn’t feed their kids and without the first milk they died even with attempts to bottle feed them. They will be giving up on this breed of goats.

They do still have chickens, and Scott was as excited to talk seeds as I was. They brought a beautiful gift of multi-colored eggs, which will last us until Easter.

All the food was delicious and the company was great. We moved from room to room sitting on all the chairs Steve has made this winter and talking about gardens, children, food and projects.

Come Spring!