Before we left for Greece Neel and I were invited to join, of all things, a Gourmet Club. Go figure. I like to cook, and we do a lot of it around here, but gourment? No where close. Still, these are about 4 couples that we know and they seem to be fairly low-stress kinds of folks. This dinner's theme, for our first time together, was "Local Flavor." I'm not very good at stretching myself (be brave...), but I volunteered to do the dessert. We're fairly new to this area, and I'm not up on what I'm sure are thousands of locally famous desserts (please, tell me for next time!), so I decided on a pavlova with fresh, locally grown berries. And what's funny, is that when I logged on to write this post, I found out that some other folks were hankering for pavlova as well.

A pavlova is basically a meringue, but softer inside. I followed one of Ina's recipes (of course) and just let it sit in warm oven all day.

After it meringue-d (?) I topped it with locally grown blackberries and a triple blackberry sauce (blackberries, chambord and blackberry jam).

I love dinner parties. I love the whirl of anticipation as you get ready picking food, flowers and wine and the house gets all sparkly. We started having them when Neel was in graduate school and our closest friends were a group of gay men. Leave it to a gay man to have corn straight out of the can for his weeknight dinner and still throw a fabulous dinner party. (Remember our white linen party Mark? I'm sure I have some pictures of that somewhere. I'll have to locate them and scan them in.) Straight out of college, I was just getting my legs under me as a cook. We had a lot of casseroles. But I learned how to roast a chicken and make enchiladas. Oh, and noodles with peanut sauce.

I had just the best dinner set-up ever when we were living in California. We had a standing dinner with one friend on Monday nights and another standing dinner on Friday nights. We alternated houses and I had it worked out that on the Mondays we cooked, the Fridays we were out. This meant that every week you were given a fabulous meal and got to make one. And they were always more elaborate than your normal weeknight fare. Our Monday nights were with Neel's boss, and we had very similar tastes in a lot of things. Start off with a gin and tonic...funny, one of my favorite memories of those nights is coming into Anette's house and having her ask, "Bombay or No. 10?" and really trying to decide what kind of gin I was in the mood for that night. We'd munch on an appeitzer while we finished cooking. This is when I first started making tapenade. Even the Greeks followed my trend! And each week we'd work on a new recipe. Indian. Mexican. Grilled. You name it, we tried it.

Our Fridays were with a British family who had a son Callum's age. We had some lovely "roasty dinners" with those guys. The kids would play and we'd drink and drink and drink. Dinner would roll in a few hours later, and when the Brits were cooking, we always had trifle for dessert. It was a great way to start the weekend. My memories of those dinners were of softly lit rooms, softly playing music, kids romping and then winding down and being read to. Talking, talking, talking.

Oh little dinners, how much I miss you. There's so much I love about our life here in the little gray house, and while there's a lot I miss about California, I think one of the things I miss the most are those dinners. I miss sitting around our dining room table with another couple, eating some lovingly made food and talking about nothing. Picking out some music to last us through the night. Deciding what appetizer will best fit with the entree I can't wait to make. Lighting the candles and watching them sizzle and sputter as the shadows lengthen. I miss it. I miss doing it for friends, and I miss having it done for me. We tend to go out here. If we're getting together with another couple or two, we don't eat in. (Don't get me wrong, I love to go out for dinner. It's possibly one of my favorite things to do. Way, way better than orderinga veggie sub and watching The Great Escape.) I'm not sure what the difference is. We live just as far from some of our friends here as we did in California, so it's not the distance. Maybe it's having school-age kids as opposed to little ones at home. Lives are busy, for sure. I've tried a few times, but I haven't managed to get it quite right. Do I sound wistful? That's how I feel.

We've had some parties, and I haven't really enjoyed those. Not intimate enough maybe. Too much hassle, for sure. And really, I've had people over for dinner lots. It just didn't seem to take. I'm going to keep trying though. We have a couple of Greek dinners planned for later in the summer. A big one next week to thank all of our wonderful neighbors for their help with Lucy while we were gone. I can't wait to get out the cook books and start thinking about that one.

So the Gourmet Club felt nice to me. Nice to cook, nice to have some wine and nice to eat some good food. Our local flavor was heavily geared toward seafood. Crab dip with bruschetta.

Steamed crabs, along with corn and potatoes, asparagus and artichokes. The local flavors are pretty good around here.

So I'm not sure what I need to do to get the dinner-vibe really going. Maybe a karmic overhaul of the dining room or something. But I'll keep trying. Anyone free for dinner?