#6: A Vegetarian Takeover

Beautiful weather allowed us to dine al fresco.

It's been a few weeks since the last dinner, but with the start of the summer and some vacation time thrown in, I have been delayed in posting about our last You Pick Two event.  In terms of the meal, it was one of the more challenging ones for me since all but one of our guests were vegetarians.  And, even more challenging, some of the guests did not care for mushrooms, eggplant, raw tomatoes, or blue cheese!  Some of my favorite foods on this earth!  After getting over that, I got to thinking... maybe they just didn't have mushrooms or eggplant prepared in a way that exhibited their best characteristics.  So I was going to challenge them to try one of them again, and I picked eggplants.

I feel that eggplants get a terrible reputation because they are usually prepared one of two ways: fried (and usually greasy) or cooked in a heavy sauce (and therefore quite mushy).  I think eggplant works best when grilled and I wanted to revisit a recipe from Nigella's breakthrough book, Nigella Bites, that I made many years ago.  It is a type of involtini, which is an italian word for a small bite of food consisting of some outer layer wrapped around a filling.  In this dish, sliced eggplant is grilled, stuffed, and cooked in a sauce.  For this preparation, the stuffing included bulgar wheat, feta, pistachios, and herbs.  It came out great and the eggplant-haters ate and enjoyed it.  Rounding out the night's menu were a crostini with homemade ricotta (which is surprisingly easy), a chilled tomatillo-advocado soup, an asparagus-gruyere tart, and a risotto made with barley instead of rice.  I tried to avoid pasta because I feel like a lot of menus just resort to pasta for vegetarians.  Dessert was a summer favorite of mine, peach cobbler.  Everyone enjoyed the food, but I think the barley risotto and peach cobbler were the stars of the night.  So who were the guests?

Crostini with homemade ricotta and caramelized onions for the first course.

The two we invited were newer friends of ours that we met through a good friend of ours that stayed with us for a few months last summer.  Sam and Anka are a couple that have been together for several years; and we met them through our friend Brandon.  Sam is a charming hipster-type that home brews and has lots of really cool tattoos.  I don't run in many of the hipster social circles, but Sam is one of the nicest guys I have met during my many years in DC.  His partner, Anka, just finished her masters at night and works at a professional association that advocates for women's health issues.  Sam and Anka are a modern couple that I greatly enjoy hanging out with so I was really curious to see who they invited.  They invited another couple they know, Andy and Cat (which is short for Catherine).  Anka and Cat went to college together and also work together.   Andy is a director at an organization that deals with event planning and he oversees production and design of sets for various events, in particular we talked about some recent car shows he worked at - which we both thought are events still stuck in the past.

Homemade ricotta after being drained and chilled in cheesecloth.

In a first for our dinners, the mystery guests beat the invited guests to our house.  Cat and Andy live in Dupont Circle and the phenomenal weather that night, which allowed us to eat outside on our back patio, meant they could walk up to our place in Mount Pleasant.  Much like Sam and Anka, they are incredibly pleasant, calm, and easy to talk to - so it was not an issue to meet them first.  Sam and Anka soon arrived.  And in another first, I had asked Sam, who home brews and works part time at Atlas Brewery, to bring some of his favorite brews to eat along the meal.  We still made a cocktail and had wine with dinner, but Sam's beers were far better than anything we had purchased.  We ate our food and sipped on wine and beer on the patio well into the evening.  It was one of the nicest You Pick Two's we have had yet.  Here is the menu from the evening:

MENU

Vegetarian Takeover

Appetizer

Crostini with ricotta and caramelized onions

Homemade ricotta, lemon zest, thyme-balsamic glazed onions

First Course

Chilled avocado-tomatillo soup with lime

Roasted tomatillos and peppers, Haas avocado,

organic sour cream, lime/mint garnish

Main

Soft & sharp eggplant involtini

Grilled eggplant, bulgur wheat-pistachio stuffing, feta, tomato sauce

Asparagus and gruyere tart

Puff pastry, grilled asparagus, gruyere & parmesan

Barley risotto with spinach and herb puree

Toasted barley, fresh herbs, spinach, lemon, parmesan

Sweet

Peach cobbler

Peaches, organic vanilla bean ice cream

Guests

Nevena Minor

Sam Puffenbarger

Cat Sacks

Andy Ward