Menu Making 101
+ a cottage party game you've never heard of (because I just made it up) and an ideal autumn apéritif you can try tonight
The garden is on fire right now. Huge heads of hydrangeas have flushed pink, the dahlia blossoms are blazes out of control, yellow lilies rise like candle flames from amidst the sparks of coneflowers and the glowing red and orange embers of nasturtiums. Only the angelic gardenias remain innocently white; mind you, their fragrance is intoxicating enough to put you under, so they have their own sneaky flamboyance. I walk the path every day admiring the spectacle, taking it all in before it comes time for the curtain call.
I’m sitting out here now, surrounded by this riot of colour, trying to sort out a dinner menu for the weekend, dinners being minor spectacles in their own right. I do have other things to do, by the way, but this is what I want to write about this week, so you’ll have to put up with what might come off as a Lady Cunard sort of problem. It’s not. It’s content of a kind we all need sometimes, not least of all to soothe and distract us from, well, other things. How about first we take a walk through the garden?
Most of the time we just fling dinners together willy-nilly, which is fine. But it’s rather nice, too, to be able to plot out something special. It’s even better when we can set a planned menu aside for a few days and come back to it, because often when we return to what we thought was a perfectly balanced dinner plan (just like a life plan), on paper anyway, we realize we’ve got one too many dishes of the same consistency or that we’ve repeated a cooking method in a way that’s boring.
For example, if we’re serving chicken in cream sauce for a main course, obviously we aren’t going to want ice cream or pots de crème for dessert, but rather something like a fruit tart, which is not too rich and has a bit of crispness. If we’re having poached fish in the main course, we’re not going to want to end on poached peaches. Poach one of the two and grill the other to solve the problem. And so on. (The more courses there are, the harder it gets!)
I wrote about menu planning in some depth in The Inviting Life, so I went back to look up what I’d said those years ago, and it turns out: lots! But I have even more to say now. Since back-to-school season is in full swing, how about a mini-refresher workshop on the topic right here and now?
