Blackbird I

My mother and sister drove up to spend the weekend with me. We’d planned on having dinner Saturday night with the Marquee, whom they’d never met. I suggested we cook a meal and asked them what we should make.

‘We could do hamburgers,’ mom offered, ‘that would be simple.’

‘Hmmm,’ I said, ‘I was thinking more along the lines of a pork loin.’

‘With,’ my sister added, ‘a Rum Orange reduction. And some roasted vegetables.’

‘Roasted root vegetables would be good,’ I said, ‘parsnips, turnips and potatoes,’

‘Sweet potatoes would be better than potatoes,’ my sister said, ‘with some coriander and Moroccan spices. And a frissee salad with a lemon vinaigrette.’

‘How about a lemon caper vinaigrette?’ I suggested.

This went on until the menu was settled. We went to the grocery store and picked out our supplies. When we came home, I made the pâte brisée for the tart, the lemon caper vinaigrette and started marinating the Pork loin in Myer’s dark rum, garlic, bay leaves, peppercorns and the juice from eight Florida oranges.


By mid afternoon, we’d started roasting the eggplant for the ajlouke we were serving for an opening snack. While I concentrated on the Pear and Blue Cheese tart, using Bosc pears and Danish Blue, my sister prepared the roasted root vegetables. We ended up also getting a rutabega, pearl onions and fennel. After she finished the cutting, she built the bonfire to roast them. While she was getting the fire going, I put the pork loin in the oven and put the marinade on the stove top to make the reduction.

When the Marquee arrived, we had the ajlouke and toasted pita in the living room. We also served pickled hearts of palm and artichoke hearts. We served Lillet blanc with grapefruit wedges in chilled tumblers.

We moved to the dinner table and served the salad, mixed greens—rather than the frissee—with dried currents and freshly ground pistachio nuts topped with the lemon caper vinaigrette. We served the Trinchero Family Select 200 Pinot Noir.

After we finished the salads, I served the pork loin with the rum and orange reduction and the roasted root vegetables with Moroccan spices.

I was most excited about the dessert though. A few years back, I was at a tasting and had The Noble Semillon 1999, a dessert wine by d’Arenberg, from Australia. Now, I know what you’re thinking, because I think the same thing all the time, ‘Australian wine? I’d sooner drink horse urine.’ But I think the very things that make Australian wine taste so unimaginably bad, are the right things to make a good dessert wine. The d’Arenberg Riesling is in higher production, but if you can get your hands on the Semillon, do so. At the tasting, I remembered thinking that it would go really, really well with pears and blue cheese. So for the past couple of years, I kept on trying to come up with an autumn occasion to think up a recipe for a pear and blue cheese tart.

And the pear and blue cheese tart and The Noble did go very well together. Most exciting.