Palmabella's Passions

Friday night we hosted our annual dinner with friends, Jan and Les and Fiona and Steve.
They are all leaving for the holidays, so we needed to have it early in the month. The trees were all lit, plenty of cookies were baked, and it felt like Christmas! The table was festive.

Photo frames of each person were used as napkin rings.

We began in the family room, with Pom martinis and parmigiano with honey from Bologna. We moved to the dining room table for our first course: a trip of tastes. Cream of green chili soup, a sausage-mushroom-goat cheese puff, and a seared scallop with spicy sauce atop a slice of zucchini and yellow squash.

The salad was curly lettuce, spinach, figs soaked in fig syrup, pecans, gorgonzola and cranberries with a fruity vinagarette.

While the roasts rested, we enjoyed my experiment with pomegranate sorbet.

The entree was herb-crusted rack of lamb, basil-lamb sausage risotto, and broccolini sauteed in butter, with raisins and almonds.

Dessert was worth waiting for, so we took a break, and moved back to the family room to enjoy more wine. We had a strawberry and cream cheesecake bite, a triple chocolate cheesecake bite with caramel, and a cookie!

THEN, on full tummies, we opened gifts. There was a travel theme this year, and everyone was quite creative with wonderful travel items for each other...but that is another whole blog topic!

We all had quite a wonderful evening. It is one of our favorite holiday traditions!