At the end of 2012 Sam and I made huge strides to get our condo ready for guests. Other friends had stopped by of course in the six months since we’d bought the place, but it was always in a state of flux with furniture, repairs, etc. all pending. By the time my parents showed up in November it was mostly complete. Early in 2013 Sam had to go to China for work, but when she returned we started lining up guest dinners. In the month since Sam came back she has already cooked two gourmet meals for old friends at our condo, and if our schedule wasn’t so full of other things (trips for work, hiking Mt. Wilson, Disneyland, weddings, etc.) we’d have already had two or three more couples over. We’re actually at the point now where we’re pushing off dates with friends until May because we’re so busy on the weekends.
Our first dinner guests of the year were B and S. B went through most of grad school with Sam and I. After school he opened his own business building mobile applications for major companies. I’m now asking him for advice on this little adventure. B’s wife, S, is now pregnant, so it may be the last time we get to see them for a while. Sam made “surf n’ turf.”
Desert isn’t pictured, but consisted of doughnut holes, baked till crispy then dipped in mixed berry sauce and melted chocolate.
Sam often makes this same berry sauce as she discovered my favorite desert is white cake with ice cream and berry sauce. The berry sauce is crucial as it gets absorbed by the cake and turns it into a berry cake. Soon she started making the sauce all the time and I started putting it on everything. B liked the berry sauce so much that he took a batch of it home and surprised his wife with a big box of doughnuts the next day for dipping.
Our next couple of guests was also an old grad school friend and his wife. E and I used to go out to lunch a lot since he and I work across the street from each other. His wife, M, also just finished grad school (not at Pepperdine) and they are getting ready to move to a more southern part of Los Angeles where she was hired. Sam wanted to cook mushroom soup for their meal and on Superbowl Sunday she did a test run with pizza-toast:
The soup was the best mushroom soup I’ve ever had. It was very creamy and had a thick mushroom taste without being too overpoweringly dark. I think she minced several kinds of mushrooms so no single shroom could overwhelm the palate, but mixing them together produced a more mellow smooth flavor. As if that wasn’t enough, Sam bought some fresh (I guess no cheese is “fresh” – right?) Parmesan cheese to grate into the soup.
She also served this with a pasta salad and goat cheese, basil and cherry tomatoes.
After all of this she followed it up with strawberries dipped in chocolate, but the salads and soup were so filling we could barely eat any of them.
What our guests don’t realize is that Sam cooks like this all the time, and that makes me incredibly lucky!
