Gourmet Club – January 21, 2012, Our 20th Anniversary

The first gourmet dinner of the year was the 20th anniversary of our first ever dinner. When trying to decide what to serve we thought that we would serve the same items that we had on that first dinner 20 years ago.  We tried out the entrée and decided that it did not have the same appeal as it did back then.

At our first dinner we had wine, but none of us had any kind of expertise yet. It took Doug another year or two to become the resident expert and sommelier. After dinner we got out the liqueurs and had just about anything you can think of; mostly Kahlua, but also Myers rum and peach schnapps. Whew!

For this 20th anniversary we picked up a bottle of Kahlua for old time’s sake and also included a bottle of Mexican Kahlua that we got on our recent Caribbean cruise.

I found the 3D pictures I took at the first dinner and had them out for everyone to see. After dinner I got everyone to gather around and we took another picture of the group posed like we were 20 years ago.

 The Menu and Winelist

The Presentation

This dinner proved to be really labor intensive, far more so than most. For the crostini one needed to make a garlic compote. Karen spent about 45 minutes just peeling the garlic to get ready for that. For the gnocchi you had to roll out snakes of potato dough then cut them into pieces, then boil them for just the right amount of time. We discovered  if you boil them too long, they just turn into mashed potato. Also for the gnocchi we had to brown some prosciutto. It took me at least half an hour to separate the ultra thin layers. They tore so easily so extra care had to be taken. The mushroom caps on the Chicken Breast A L’Archiduc are fluted. They look really nice when done but take a long time to do. Too bad they get covered with the sauce so much. And lastly, the charlotte always takes a long time to do, but is one of our family’s very favorite desserts.