A late posting about a dinner

Years ago when I lived in the UK I was introduced to the wonders of Beaujolais Noveau through my uncle Nils von Taube.   There were a number of weekends Catherine and I spent at the my uncle's country house the Old Rectory in Great Wigborough drinking the stuff as if it was juice.  Weekends at my uncle's place was like something out of PG Wodehouse.

Since then I have tried to get some Beaujolais Noveau each year, when I lived in Lillooet I had ordered in for enough years running that the Lillooet liquor store started to automatically get each year.

It is amazing how few varieties were on offer this year, the BC Liquor stores only had two varieties, the same ones that Liquor Plus had as well.   We got a number of bottles of the Mommessin.  The cost is steeper than what I think it really reasonable, about $15 a bottle, in the UK 20 years ago (wow, that is getting to be a long time ago) I was paying about $5-$6 a bottle.

As a wine it was what I expected, very young and fruity, I do not buy it because it is an amazing a wine.  It is a celebration of the harvest and fall.   It is a wine for a party.

Sheila and I like to cook and cook well.   It is something that is hard to do on a daily basis so we have dinner parties from time to time.  "Beaujolais Noveau est arrive" is a good reason for a feast of some sort.

Our dinner was a series of tasting plates.   Beef carpaccio,
beet carpaccio, speck kuchen, curry tarts, deviled eggs,
two types of puff pastry pinwheels
and some other stuff

We invited six friends to join us this year and decided to do a tasting dinner.  We made some puff pastry pinwheels filled with pesto and ham and the other with a tomato sauce.  Sheila often makes these as an appetizer or hors d'oeuvre.

I made a beef carpaccio, it is the first time a tried it and it was impressed with what came of it.   I tried to slice the pieces too thin at first but realized that the pounding worked just as well with slightly thicker pieces.   For the vegetarians we had a beet carpaccio

We had two different tarts, a caramelized onion puff pastry tart and a sweet potato curry tart.   Speckkuchen were there as well, this is a yeast dough filled perogy sort of thing.  It is filled with bacon, onions and craisins - the last bit is my own adaptation.

We also had deviled eggs, they sound simple, but good ones require the right mixture for the filling and caviar on top.

All in all the people at the dinner we impressed and happy with what we served.   As I am writing this Sheila is asking me when we should have our next dinner party.   We are looking at January 29th.