Back For Two Days.......

Back for two days.....
must be time for a dinner party. We haven't seen Barry and Tracy since June. They're back. We need to catch up and what better way to do it than over the dinner table.

Add to that, I have a new cooking magazine so thought I'd try a couple of new recipes. One is a Nutty Chocolate Shortbread and the other was Green beans in brown butter sauce with pine nuts. But....today at the market the green beans didn't look that tender and I had taken the pinenuts back to Houston. So the green bean recipe almost changed to broccoli in a brown butter sauce with toasted almonds but at the last minute I decided on broccoli sauteed with garlic....an old standard.

I wanted to keep the menu simple and not a lot of work so I sent Ned down to the end of our street for a Grande cocktail de camarones from Mariscolandia. It is in a great sauce but the sauce is pretty soupy so I added finely chopped tomato, yellow bell pepper, a jalapeno, onion, cilantro, and avocado. We served it with chips. Nice appetizer.

I roasted a filete de res, the broccoli and made a polenta with Parmesan cheese.

From my new Fine Cooking magazine I made the Nutty chocolate shortbread. Pretty easy recipe but I decided to add something or as Emeril would say, BAM! Initially I thought I would add the topping from my recipe for the Chocolate Truffle Tart which is made with mascarpone cheese and whipping cream. But the mascarpone cheese was 49 pesos for a 8-ounce container. Too, too much. I used some softened cream cheese and mixed it with crema, a bit of sugar and vanilla and whipped it until it formed peaks. That was perfect. Sweet but it still had the tang of the cream cheese, very smooth. Just a spoon full was a nice compliment to the dense dark chocolate shortbread. The Nutty Chocolate Shortbread recipe is a keeper.

Tracy is a painter and we got into a lively discussion about Mexican artist from the 1920 to 1940 period and how they used color fields and filled the canvas. Discussions about marketing yourself as an artist...what it takes and how some artists seem to be able to circumvent normal channels and make a splash. We talked about maintaining relationships over the years. We talked about friends and what has happened since we last saw each other.

This was a good evening.