Foodie Dinner with our French Friends

My husband and I are foodies. Not to the extent that we spend all of our time thinking and talking about food, but to the point that we love an excuse to make a gourmet meal and we are happy to attempt creating just about anything from scratch.

This week, a dear friend of mine and his wife were visiting from France, the dinner we planned was fabulous. I'm not one to go on about menus, but I had to share our delight with someone and you seem an excellent audience for such things...

The meal started off with a light appetizer, mussels steamed in white wine and fresh, local, strong garlic. Between catching up and many beautiful conversations, we moved on to grilled chicken in a sauce of whole mustard, apricot preserves, fresh mint, fresh parsley, and other delightfully flavorful ingredients, with grilled asparagus on the side. Our guests were kind enough to bring a bottle of rose wine from their French hometown to be enjoyed along with the courses which followed. As is expected in France, the light salad came after dinner. It contained watercress, a relative of endives, raisins and a homemade dressing to match the meal. A spread of three cheeses followed: the soft Humbolt Fog, firm Dubliner and potent Italian Taleggio. My husband had retrieved local bakery bread that afternoon from our favorite A&J King Bakery in Salem on which to sample each cheese. As if we weren't all full at that point, Lemon Squares - my family's secret recipe (with an experimental extra ingredient: muddled lavender infused in to the lemon juice) made an appearance at the meal's close.

Conversations continued into the night, we said farewell with plans to meet again before long, perhaps on their side of the ocean next.

The evening was delightful (and I look forward to eating the leftovers for days to come)! I would have shared pictures, but we were all too busy enjoying the company to snap a single image. The smell of the cheese however, that lasted for days.