Just six of us.. what you can call a Dinner Party.
In Melbourne, we were very fond of Dinner Parties and some of the hosts were legendary. One such during my Junior Medical Days was Peter Carson who had a hideaway of a house up in the hills and we were eager to get an invite to his house, where the dinner party would go on till the early hours of the morning with multiple courses, and needless to say the delicious wines of Australia. How can I forget the First of the Year Champagne Brunches with my dear Sally, at other times Jeffry Lipp and many of us enjoyed rotating dinner parties where Medicine was not the topic but food and travel were..
In Jamaica, dinner parties had another flavour in that it was just dinner together with friends since all the work was relegated to others. There was less of a flavour of companionship but much more a sense of social obligations. Baracoa was a continuous dinner party but then again all the ingredients for dinner was not available easily on a routine basis, so there was a repetition of food but Rum certainly flowed freely in my house there.
In Miami, dinner parties as such are less common than dinner together at restaurants but i love the australian sit down around the table with six to eight of your good friends and chat and laugh and eat and drink till late..
I wrote to my good friend Sandra that I would come home soon so that we can repeat dinner parties and she is a good hostess to throw one..
The evening started with what you can call mouth refrshers, there were two varieties of them, one was fish and potato mixed with a nice sauce, and the second was salmon mousse, mind you, they are small but enough to refresh you. We got down to gobble down some Oysters brought there from Brittany, still the freshness is less even if they were less than a day away from their habitat. Slurping them in was fun indeed. An excellent sweet white wine Tariquet Grives was available and I must say I may have drunk half of that bottle, while a suave red was open for accompaniment with the main course. Escargot with pesto sauce was nothing short of divine. I was glad I had my French dictionary handy since many of the dishes had names which I did not know readily, such as Guinea Fowl, which was the centre of attraction. The meat was tender slightly sweet not as tough as turkey but softer than chicken.. oh my god, my little stomach was filling up.. Home baked apple pie arrived with cream on top and i knew i dont have to eat anything for the next 24 hours.
A delicious dinner and good company. This is the best of France!
