A sample of summer from the pantry
Our kitchen could be in a museum, it’s so old. But it’s big enough to fit a dinner party, start to finish, and the big island has enough counter space for a substantial buffet, a real advantage feeding a crowd.
When six friends came to dinner last night we went to the pantry for hors d’oeuvres and put out quite a spread representing our garden’s summer production. On one plate we had sweet pickled green tomatoes along with extra-crispy bread-and-butter cucumber pickels. There was a platter of more piquant items, including our favorite Texas-style pickled okra, our recently discovered spicy green tomato pickle mix and pickled banana peppers. There was a separate dish of Italian-style marinated vegetables–carrots, cauliflower, green pepper, onion–as well as the eggplant we like so much preserved in olive oil with basil and garlic.
I put out a platter of cheeses, including a fresh goat cheese to be spread on crackers and topped with a sweet green tomato mincemeat. Since I am not eating starches, there was also a small bowl of zucchini slices. I like to smear goat cheese on a zucchini slice and dab it with the mincemeat. Try it with a gin martini, you can’t go wrong.
A bowl a fresh radishes mixed with mildly peppery Hakurei turnips also goes well with cocktails.
You tend to forget how busy you’ve been putting food by from the garden–or what a great assortment of food you have stashed in the pantry–until you see it all spread out like that. Everyone was invited to serve themselves with small forks and tiny plates.
Dinner was a repeat of a menu recently prepared for a client: mixed salad greens from the garden with mizuna, red mustard, arugula, toasted walnuts and honeycrisp apple, all tossed with a honey-mustard vinaigrette; pork tenderloin, brined then grilled, with mashed rutabaga garnished with fried shallots, and braised red cabbage with smokey bacon; and for dessert, apple crisp and vanilla ice cream.
Normally I don’t like to cook a la minute at dinner parties. It’s so much more relaxing to have all the food done ahead of time so you can enjoy your guests. So I spent part of the evening by the grill and this time of year, when the sun is setting around 5 pm, that can be a challenge unless you’ve thought to place some strategic lighting around the grill. We hung Christmas lights, which work just fine.
We are engaging the concerns of a hungry planet--slowly--right here in our kitchen garden in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House.
What a fabulous feast, Ed … and a lovely gift to your friends. Great to have all the links to so much summer bounty
Joanna
Joanna, I wasn’t sure whether I was being clever or just lazy emptying out the pantry for this party. In the end I think I impressed myself with the steady, persistent work turning garden produce into food stores, and our friends really liked the buffet. Some of them had never tried pickled okra, or pickled green tomato, two things we have in abundance.