Dinner Party!

When our kids were younger, we were always having dinner parties. It seemed like the easiest -- read the only -- way to get together with our friends, who also had little ones who prevented Saturday evenings at home from being relaxing occasions.

Since the girls became teenagers, I have gotten out of the dinner party habit. Saturday evening at home with a take-out pizza, a glass of wine, and a DVD, book, or my computer sounds just heavenly after a long week at work.

But last weekend was un pont -- a long weekend, and a four-day one at that. So I finally got it together enough to have a real dinner party: three other couples, new recipes, plenty of champagne to celebrate Obama's victory -- the whole nine yards.

As a bonus, I picked up a few new ideas along the way.

The dish in the top photo is a fairly simple rice, corn and black bean salad with a mild homemade salsa. I got the recipe -- and the presentation idea -- from here:

I had bought this book for myself about a year ago, and yet had never gotten around to using it.

I like Deseine's idea of presenting a salad in mugs, mainly because the ingredients don't have to be arranged as artfully as in the now omnipresent verrines. And the visual effect was still much nicer and less picnic-like than just plopping a big salad bowl in the middle of the table.

For the main dish, I also tried a new recipe from this book:

Crumbles are oh-so-fashionable in France; I often wonder if there are now more French recipes for crumbles than British ones.

The recipe I started with was called "Crumble Nordique," which consisted primarily of seasoned salmon over a bed of onions, with a savoury crumble topping.

I decided to go green with a bed of onions and zucchini, and at one point early on in the preparation, the dish looked like this:


Of course, later it got crumbled and baked. But by that time, I was having such a good time I forgot the camera for the rest of the evening!