Catering the 25 seat LCF Board Dinner went off smashingly and without a hitch. Last year's was somewhat more hectic as the recipes were more complicated, and there was the additional stress of me leaving for the Appalachian Trail in a few days. It gave everything a Last Meal sort of quality.
This year, the opening night's barbecue had a nice molded Greek salad and sides of hummus and harissa. As always, harissa is a big hit, though it is nothing more than a puree of roasted red bell peppers, eggplant, olive oil, salt, and cayenne. We followed with lemon bars (it is the South, you know) and baklava.
The board dinner's menu included cheese, olives, chopped salad with pine nuts, ciabatta, ratatouille, various pastas, roast chicken, and sliced whole roast tenderloin with a marsala-garlic-basil cream sauce. This sauce had to be improvised since apparently no grocery store in the state carries Knorr bearnaise anymore, or even dried tarragon. Wal-mart does manage to find room to stock no fewer than seventeen different types of sausage gravy.
Tiramisu chased all this food down our gullet, although it would have been much better had I made the tiramisu one more day in advance. It was a bit runny the day of serving, but thirty hours later it had really come together.
All in all, I thought it was a decent meal, a seven or eight on my personal scale. It's a good thing all those leftovers are in a different house. All in all, though, when I groan thinking of the richness of this food, I just think about this article:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/healthy_eating/article1640930.ece
Compared to the Edwardian diet, the board dinner was practically a dietetic.
Bon appetit!
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