Remembered to Take Pictures -- Mostly

The gourmet dinner was great! Food turned out fine, even though I think I overcooked Dawna's chicken -- she didn't complain....Dawna eats fish and chicken, but that's pretty much it for protein, so if we choose to serve red meat, I make something else for her.

The recipes for the salad, pork and polenta were in a Sunday addition to our newspaper. It's called Relish and shows up periodically every couple of months.



Missed getting a picture of the salads just as they were served, but here are all the ingredients: The mustard, honey, grated rind from the lime, chives, champagne vinegar and olive oil all went into the vinaigrette. Butter lettuce was distributed among the plates, grapefruit, sliced avocado and toasted walnuts were sprinkled on the salad and then the vinaigrette drizzled over all.

The grape tomatoes were tossed with olive oil, minced garlic, salt and pepper before roasting in a hot oven for about 15 minutes. I sliced my beautiful homemade artisan bread (I really have to do a post just on that!), toasted it and ladled the tomatoes and juice over the bread slices. I remembered seeing a recipe for this, couldn't find it so just made it work...


Rosemary is easy to find around here -- just walk outside my back door and there's a great big old bush!



Rubbed olive oil on the pork tenderloins and then coated them with a mixture of rosemary, garlic, salt & pepper. Pan seared and then roasted in a hot oven for 15 minutes.

Apricot preserves, garlic and lemon juice -- not great for toast, but really good on pork tenderloin as a glaze!

Each plate had polenta prepared with milk and chicken broth with slices of the pork tenderloin and green beans sauteed with garlic, lemon rind and olive oil. Lots of garlic in this dinner! We've made comments before about how much butter is in most of these gourmet dinners, but there was hardly any butter in this one -- olive oil and garlic seemed to be the theme...

And, finally, dessert! Pears roasted with a bit of butter, brown sugar, cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg, then sprinkled with dried cranberries and toasted sliced almonds and drizzled with a white chocolate/cream sauce. This recipe came from a magazine advertisement for one of the spice companies, McCormick, I think...
November was Dawna's month, but we were all busy and/or out of town, so she is doing hers next week on Monday. I'll bring the camera!!