You Who?

Saturday Night with the old standby

Saturday night we had a couple friends over we hadn't seen in a long long time. We made our old standby appetizer-and-enterée combo that we've made for just about everyone: Artichokes followed by Strip Steak with Mushroom Madeira sauce. For side dishes we made red wine risotto and summer squash and zucchini ragout. For wine we had a really nice bottle of Hess Estate Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 1999 which our friends had brought.

I keep making this Madeira sauce because I'm comfortable with the recipe and it turns out pretty consistently. (Actually, there are a lot of chicken recipes I'm OK with, but I usually want red wine.) I think this was my best Madeira sauce so far. I used a different brand, Feist Full Rich Madeira, rather than the Sandeman's I have always used before. I also used a mix of white mushrooms and shitakes, which made the sauce a little more interesting (hopefully I'll remember to do in the future). With two types of mushrooms I think it qualifies as a Wild Mushroom Madeira sauce. We still really need to work on the timing of dinner... our guests were left at the table watching us cook for like 15 minutes after the appetizer while we tried to finish off the main course. For risotto, I wanted to try something different so I used this red wine risotto recipe. It tasted fine, but not that different from regular risotto, and it had a rather unappetizing burgundy-gray hue to it.

For dessert we had vanilla ice cream (2% -- see we're healthy) with fresh raspberries that had been slightly macerated in Chambord and drizzled with Stonewall Kitchen's Raspberry Liquer Hot Fudge. We paired this with St. Supéry's 2002 Moscato, a dessert wine I bought on a whim because it was relatively inexpensive and I wondered if it was any good. It is -- I'd suggest this as a nice light, not too sweet or syrupy, dessert wine that you can find at many state stores (here's a list of where you can find it in NH). Pairing it with a chocolatey dessert was not best; a fruity dessert or light cake would be better. For a decent description, check out their web page where they have "video" tasting notes from the winemaker.

Anyway, we finished the night off with espresso, capuccinos and the latest Queer Eye episode. The revelation of the night was that -- despite both being from the tech industry -- neither of our guests had heard of blogs! I guess that goes to show how long it had been since we'd seen them.