Mega Dinner

It’s late at night (early in the morning?) but I’m still winding down from dinner last night.

A couple of weeks ago, Seppo randomly asked me if I wouldn’t mind having a couple of people over for dinner. It seemed like a decent idea, so I agreed.

[Continued after lunch the following day.]

Seppo put a bunch of people who know each other down for an evite for last weekend. We figured about half will have prior plans, so we’ll get maybe 4-5 people over. That’s doable. Turned out only like 1 person could make it, so we changed the evite for this weekend.

Well, turned out almost everyone could make it and were were gonna have 9 people over, in addition to us! Whoa!

Seppo has recently gone on a food science kick, so suddenly he wanted do a fancy-pants dinner. I randomly decided I wanted to make the French Laundry’s Salmon Cornets, so, not thinking it through, I agreed.

We cooked all day (perhaps we’ll cover the details of the dishes on the foodblog) and had a great time. We had Kevin, Uyen, Klay, Alan, Becky, Hoa, Sean, Holly, and Mack over, and served the salmon cornets, Seppo’s homemade curry-stuffed ravioli (one oversized rav) atop mashed potatoes, mixed greens with slices of smoked duck breast drizzled with reduced balsamic and extra virgin olive oil, short ribs with root vegetables and chive oil, and Seppo’s molten chocolate cake with creme anglaise and blobs of raspberry sauce. Oh yes, I can’t forget the piles of cheese, olive bread, and drinks people showed up with. 🙂 In particular, I enjoyed the triple cream brie Seppo found and a Scottish semi-hard cheese of some sort that Hoa brought.

The party wound down around 1am, after Seppo conked out on the couch. I stayed up until like 4:30am websurfing and programming the new TiVo. Heh.

It was definitely a fun time, and wouldn’t mind doing a big dinner again. Seating was problematic, which sucked, but we managed to get everyone into one room. We need to improve out time estimates. We even had a schedule and a priority list for the day, but still managed to run long. D’oh! 😀

Hopefully, Seppo will post pics soon.