Theme Your Dinner

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

You know the part of the dinner party I like the best? Designing the meal. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone talk about it this way – maybe you all do. Maybe everyone thinks about a meal like a poem or a novel or a symphony and I’ve just not been paying attention. But if you do it, you haven’t told me --- so I’ve kind of thought I invented it. Here’s the thing - try to have a theme that holds the meal (and the evening) together and let it work across the flavors and the table decor: It can be a season – or a country or a flavor. Recently I found a brilliant olive oil, pressed with oranges from Sardinia. The taste is fantastic. We made an orange sangria; served a gorgeous blue cheese with sliced walnut and orange bread as a first course; the entree was pasta with ground turkey and hot and sweet turkey sausage, cooked with sweet onions in the orange oil, mixed with fresh suprémed oranges and their juice, a lot of black pepper, a handful of chopped fresh mint and a good bit of shredded fresh parmesan. Dessert was an orange trifle. Sounds rich, but it was amazingly light and fresh tasting. We had huge bowls of oranges on the table and even the place cards (these, painted by our wonderful illustrator, Donna Mehalko) were orange-themed.