Dinner Party for Mel and Joan

Mel and Joan are leaving....going back to California for the rest of the year. I wanted to have them over for dinner before they got away. We also invited Wendy and Mike that we met at Joan and Mel's house a week or so ago.

The menu was simple:
Shrimp Remoulade
Filete de Res
Sauteed asparagus
Polenta with Parmigiano cheese
Chocolate Truffle Tart

There were two items on the menu that took some looking for the ingredients. First of all was the polenta. Last year, I could find polenta without any problems but this year I have been looking for a month and Bonanza and Espinos have not had it. But yesterday at Bonanza, I found it. Not in a carton....they are carrying it in bulk. So glad to know it is available again.

The other item...well actually two items were for the chocolate truffle tart. I needed bittersweet chocolate and I needed mascarpone cheese. Once I had seen mascarpone cheese here but I didn't trust being able to find it locally the day I needed it so when we went to Queretaro last week, I bought some. While we were there I looked all over Walmart for bittersweet chocolate and I couldn't find it. At Bonanza they had three kinds of cooking chocolate bars. One was a white chocolate, another said semi-something and so I bought the last one. It was a dark chocolate although not as bittersweet as I have gotten in the States. It also didn't stay has high in the tart pan.

The other thing I needed for the tart was cookies because I was using a crumb crust rather than a dough crust. I could have used graham, vanilla or chocolate wafer cookies but I couldn't find any of those except at Bonanza and they wanted 44.50 pesos for a box. $4 USA for small box of cookies. No thank you. So I bought the traditional Gamesa wafer cookie for thirty-seven cents and it worked just fine.

We sat at the dinner table until almost midnight just talking. I hate to see Joan and Mel leave but they'll be back to their beautiful house here next year.