Fancy Dinners

Earlier tonight I had a really fancy, delicious "Rustic American" inspired dinner at my friend David's (yes, homemade!). The three courses included: mushroom soup, pot roast (not pictured), and some kind of apple tart with salted butterscotch ice cream. I have to give him major props on presentation--that's something I need to work on... after I get my recipes down. Take a look (but seriously, these pictures do not do the food enough justice):

Mushroom soup. Corn foam in the yellow--yum! Black mushroom in the middle, dill on the side.

Pie-like crust filled with apple chunks/topped with thinly sliced apples (made into a flower/circular pattern). Salted ice cream out of focus on the bottom left corner. All from scratch ingredients!

And here come the drinks, as promised. I brought some white wine and champagne to bring to the dinner party to try out some stuff I learned in bartending school, etc.

WINE COOLER

Recipe: wine glass, fill halfway with white wine, fill with 7up or Sprite. Add lemon twist.
(I think the original recipe calls for 3/4 glass white wine and fill with 7up/Sprite, but I like my drinks a bit more on the sweet side.)

CHAMPAGNE (Sparkling Wine) SORBET

Recipe: wine glass, add two generous scoops of raspberry sorbet, fill halfway with champagne
Swirl and smash the sorbet until you get an icy/slushy consistency that looks like this:

This one I'll have to give credit to a Pan-Asian fusion restaurant in Berkeley called Unicorn. I got the idea of mixing the two from this restaurant about two years back, and since then I've been narrowing down better sorbets/champagnes over time. Last time I used Cook's champagne... dis-gus-ting! Cook's is a no-no. Try Ballatore! It might not be a champagne per se, but it's yummy (sweet, of course) and close enough to champagne.

Note: Bottle says sparkling wine, not champagne. It's perhaps sparkling wine but to me it's still champagne-esque. There's probably a whole convention of champagne-snobby folks who will say otherwise, including the reasons behind the name difference here. Pretty interesting to keep in mind, so we'll keep the two names separate for technicality's sake.


Sorbet used: Ciao Bella from Andronico's. Apparently "lampone" is Italian for "raspberry".


What a way to have fine dining in your own home!