Read, gossip, eat

A couple Fridays ago, I headed back over to Amanda and Meghan’s apartment for the third installment of our book club (you can see the first and second installments here). Our book this time was We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates, and we settled into discussion with a round of cosmos, of course!

While we gossiped about things that had nothing to do with the book worked our way through the questions, we also nibbled on french bread toasts with brie and fig preserves:





Fig + cheese = one of the best combinations ever:





For dinner, I brought along some CSA salad, and Meghan (who has become the chef of these evenings!) put together a delicious pasta with sweet corn and tomatoes:

The pasta also had a very light cheesiness. Amanda was right when she said it was like grownup mac-and-cheese:

We actually did discuss the book after we ate the pasta because we needed some digestion time — there was a lot of pasta there! However, dessert could not stay hiding in the wings for long. Dessert was my other responsibility of the night, and I had taken it seriously and gotten preparation underway right when I arrived home from work that day. I gathered the last of my CSA watermelon, crenshaw melon, and nectarine:





After cutting everything into chunks, I added some balcony basil and a spoonful of Olga’s Russian apricot jam and then coarsely mashed everything together:

I put the whole mix in the freezer — first in mine and then in Amanda and Meghan’s when I got to their apartment — until we were ready to eat it. I had no idea how it would come out, but it turned linto a refreshing summer sorbet:

On the side, we had the last bits of my Ulimana raw chocolate and the marzipan that Wife and Ted had brought me from Sicily (both had been waiting in the freezer for this moment for weeks!):

Amanda and Meghan sent me home with tons of leftover pasta, so I mixed it with my own leftover veggies … and turned it into pasta salad to last me through the next week’s lunches

I kept repeating the melon and basil combo the rest of the week, too — it made for such a peppy little fruit salad:

Amanda and Meghan, thanks for another installment of the best book club ever … and for keep me fed for an entire week after it

Speaking of books and food, do you have a favorite book about or related to food? I think mine is Like Water for Chocolate. I haven’t read it since I was maybe 15, but I remember loving it.