Aug 21 2008
Saturday Night Dinner
With K over from Canada, we needed a properly celebratory dinner. Cocktails and three courses were the order of the day!
- Duck Breasts with Pomegranate and Mint
- Mellow Meatballs
- Cherry Cheesecake
Our salad starter, seared duck breasts on a bed of rocket and chard, scattered with pomegranate seeds, pan juices and mint leaves, has to go down as one of the great unexpected sucesses of the challenge so far. I honestly hadn’t expected it to be much cop; it seemed little more than an array of individual ingredients with nothing to tie them together.
How wrong I was. The juices from the duck and pomegranate dressed the salad beautifully, and the contrast between the fruity seeds and the ripped up mint was heavenly. As an added bonus this was really very easy to make in advance. Itwas a great start to the meal, served alongside an overflowing bowl of sesame plaits and poppyseed stars made by my resident bread chef Dougal.
The meatballs didn’t, to my mind, turn out all that differently to the Red Prawn and Mango Curry I did for Dougal’s birthday. I suppose both use Red Thai curry paste and coconut milk ( and I did forget to add the honey to the meatballs) but I was a bit unimpressed. They weren’t very mellow either. Filling though, which was good on a wet night, but not the sophisticated main I had half-fancied serving everyone.
Pudding was a definite first for me- a genuine chilled cheesecake! Generally it worked well, although there was no way I could have made five digestive biscuits cover the base of my tin, so I doubled that up. The tin also turned out to have a lip in the base (perhaps I had it the wrong way up?) which made serving rather tricky and inelegant!
Over all this cheesecake was nice, it did definitely taste like a bona fide cheesecake, but I felt the topping was lacking. We used the specified Rhapsodie de St Dalfour cherry conserve, but I wouldn’t get it again. I think it needed to be sweeter. Clearly Nigella Lawson and I disagree here, as she says basically any cherry topping with no added sugar will do.
All in, quite a sucessful little dinner party, if not quite as glamorous as it might have been!
What did K think of the unbaked cheesecake? I always found them a bit odd - I’m used to the baked variety. Also, any good Canadian would have used E.D. Smith cherry pie filling for the topping! Hee.