As each of the couples hosts their gourmet dinner, they get to pick the theme of the dinner as well as the food and beverages. We started out as a wine tasting group, and usually still are, but last night Dawna and Robert chose a St. Patrick's Day theme and accompanied the meal with beer tasting, instead.
Dawna always does such a pretty table setting -- she comes up with something totally different every single time, so I'm estimating she must have a couple of hundred sets of dishes. Funny, we have the same exact house plan, but I don't have that much storage space!
There's the pot of gold on the left and a charmingly placed book of photographs below...
Half of the place settings had the shamrock napkins and the other half were a creamy solid color...
I snooped around the kitchen a little before the first course was served -- on the left is a Sage Derby English cheese and the parsley in a crystal goblet was eye-catching...
The first course was a carrot and potato soup garnished with sour cream, the sage cheese and a baby carrot. I expected it to be cold, but it was hot and yummy! Robert made "Black & Tans" to accompany this course.
I think the hit of the evening was this lamb shaped butter; we all had to speculate that it must be sheep's milk butter, but it wasn't -- we made Dawna take out the wrapper to show us that it was cow's milk and then we all dove in for a taste. We have very spirited conversations about the food and drink at these meals!
Turkey medallions were slow cooked in beer and accompanied by roasted potatoes, onions, turnips and carrots. We dissected the lamb to liberally butter the vegetables. Guiness was served with this main course.
Couldn't really get a good picture of a complete dessert because it smelled so good that we all fell on it as soon as the dishes hit the table. The apple-rhubarb crisp inspired a lot of conversation because we had very different opinions about crisp at the table. Half of us want a lot of fruit with some crisp and the other half just find the fruit part annoying and don't quite see the point of including it in the recipe. I think it was stated as "eating the yukky fruit part first to get to the crisp".
To complete the Irish theme, this was the liqueur served with dessert. It was a little strong for me (which was kind of funny considering I'm a Chivas-on-the-rocks drinker), but I absolutely loved the label on the bottle!
Next month is our turn again -- hmmmm......a theme for April.......
Dawna always does such a pretty table setting -- she comes up with something totally different every single time, so I'm estimating she must have a couple of hundred sets of dishes. Funny, we have the same exact house plan, but I don't have that much storage space!
There's the pot of gold on the left and a charmingly placed book of photographs below...
Half of the place settings had the shamrock napkins and the other half were a creamy solid color...
I snooped around the kitchen a little before the first course was served -- on the left is a Sage Derby English cheese and the parsley in a crystal goblet was eye-catching...
The first course was a carrot and potato soup garnished with sour cream, the sage cheese and a baby carrot. I expected it to be cold, but it was hot and yummy! Robert made "Black & Tans" to accompany this course.
I think the hit of the evening was this lamb shaped butter; we all had to speculate that it must be sheep's milk butter, but it wasn't -- we made Dawna take out the wrapper to show us that it was cow's milk and then we all dove in for a taste. We have very spirited conversations about the food and drink at these meals!
Turkey medallions were slow cooked in beer and accompanied by roasted potatoes, onions, turnips and carrots. We dissected the lamb to liberally butter the vegetables. Guiness was served with this main course.
Couldn't really get a good picture of a complete dessert because it smelled so good that we all fell on it as soon as the dishes hit the table. The apple-rhubarb crisp inspired a lot of conversation because we had very different opinions about crisp at the table. Half of us want a lot of fruit with some crisp and the other half just find the fruit part annoying and don't quite see the point of including it in the recipe. I think it was stated as "eating the yukky fruit part first to get to the crisp".
To complete the Irish theme, this was the liqueur served with dessert. It was a little strong for me (which was kind of funny considering I'm a Chivas-on-the-rocks drinker), but I absolutely loved the label on the bottle!
Next month is our turn again -- hmmmm......a theme for April.......
Sounds like a wonderful dinner and a great time!
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