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Sunday, December 18, 2005

Fondue!

The in-laws are here to visit on their way to the East Coast, so it's time for a special dinner, especially since we didn't have ANY dinner waiting for them last night when they arrived. Whoops - bad hostess. Again.

We'll be treating them right tonight, though. First we will start off with a warm goat cheese and marinara sauce appetizer. All you do is place some marinara in a shallow baking dish and add several thick slices of goat cheese. You heat it up in the oven until the sauce is warm and the goat cheese is soft. Serve it with a nice, crusty bread and you're done. Couldn't be easier when you keep homemade marinara sauce on hand in the freezer.

For dinner, we are planning to do fondue, wild mushroom risotto and a salad. We're doing a chicken and shrimp fondue with various sauces. The sauces are always the hardest part for me - I can never decide what to make! I usually make 4 different sauces - probably because our fondue plates have 4 different spaces for sauces. As I was trying to decide what sauces to make, I stumbled on a recipe for Quick Peanut Vinaigrette from an issue of Martha Stewart's Every Day Food and decided to give this recipe a shot. It's very tangy and I see many different uses for it. The Curry Mayo is from a recipe that my MIL shared with me, but I, excuse the expression, kicked it up a few notches. The third sauce, a Dijon-based sauce, like the vinaigrette, is really a salad dressing recipe, but it makes an excellent sauce for fondue. We do not use oil when we fondue - we use white wine, a few slices of lemon, a few slices of onion and some tarragon - easy and healthy. Tonight I think I will use part chicken broth and part wine - it kills me to dump so much wine, even if it is cheap wine, into the fondue pot. For the salad, we are using spinach instead of mixed greens for a bigger nutritional punch. Hopefully I'll have time to post some pictures later, but until then......here's the menu......

The Sauces:

3 comments:

  1. Dang this sounds like fun! Great selection!

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  2. Wow, your fondue sounds delicious. I love sauces and am always looking for new ideas. I'm sure your in-laws appreiated the special dinner!

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  3. Joe - it was so much fun we did it again tonight. :) We had enough leftovers of everything for another meal, so we figured we'd better not let it go to waste.

    jjsooner - My favorite was the curry, but the Dijon was excellent too. The peanut vinaigrette was very tasty, but too runny to really stick to the meat/shrimp. I think it would be really good on broccoli slaw.....

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