Dinner Club Hazing

This is Will and Carmen. You might know Carmen from her blog. They are the newest members of dinner club.

Will and Carmen just moved back to San Antonio after living in L.A. They both went to Trinity and we all know each other, so when they asked about being in dinner club, we all answered with a resounding huzzah!

But we couldn’t let them off so easy. We’re not a really serious dinner group (this is not your mother’s dinner club, let’s just say), but we do have some standards. Like these rules here. We follow them, especially the no apologizing part. We all like food, like to cook it, put some thought into it.

So even though we all agreed to let Carmen and Will into dinner club, we decided to have a little fun with it. A little audition, if you will. And we didn’t tell them anything about the audition before they got to our house. We waited until everyone arrived, had a toast to welcome them, and then dropped the bomb that they were going to have to cook us an appetizer, in 30 minutes, with these ingredients:

Let’s see, there’s a cucumber, some weird white vegetable, nuts, white radishes, lemon curd, prosciutto, chocolate, crackers, lobster pate, and bamboo shoots. Pretty random, right? So we gave Will and Carmen 30 minutes, some aprons, free reign to use our spices and sundry, and a lot of pressure to deal with.

Pictured: Will and Carmen making sense of these ingredients. Not pictured: me giving commentary like a judge on Top Chef.

What Will and Carmen created with the most random cornucopia of ingredients:

Prosciutto stuffed with lemon curd, on a cracker with a balsamic vinegar on top. Carmen and Will did NOT taste their dish before they presented it to us, which on Top Chef means you’re going home. But we all liked it! So no worries. Carmen said she would have liked to reduce the vinegar and salt the dish a bit more, but we don’t apologize in dinner club.

Welcome Will and Carmen!

About these ads