The tradition in Italy is that a wedding dinner should be 13 courses to wish the happy couple good luck in their new life together. When some good friends of ours – who are well-known as generous and gracious hosts – announced they got engaged, we decided to go all out and cook a celebratory 13-course Italian feast for them.
It is quite a daunting task to serve six people a 13-course feast, but we worked together as a team and the resulting jubilee was well worth the effort. This is the story of how we did it.
First, the menu planning began several days in advance. We used ideas and ingredients found online, found in cookbooks, and even some found in local Italian restaurants. Some of the dishes we invented ourselves. Here is the complete menu:
Next, we set the table nicely and left each guest a copy of the menu on their plate.
With each course requiring a small appetizer plate we needed to ensure that we had sufficient plates and ample room for plating the large number of courses quickly as they were created. It helped that the earliest dishes, such as the orange-marinated olives, we could plate an hour in advance. Our tiny kitchen was instantly transformed into a bustling Manhattan eatery churning out food at top speed for a hungry, impatient crowd.
Shown at top are the olives we marinated for two days in a blood-orange infused olive oil. Orange-infused olive oil can be bought at most gourmet food stores. If you cannot find it, you can also use regular olive oil. Simply hollow out an orange peel and put the olives and oil inside it for a few days inside your refrigerator. Fresh green olives pick up the orange flavor nicely. We served these with a light, crisp glass of Italian Prosecco. Shown above is the second appetizer, our miniature "Insalata Caprese". We stacked a basil leaf and a slice of fresh buffalo mozzarella on top of one slice of tomato. We drizzled basil-infused olive oil on top.
The course that followed was a fresh Calamari salad. This is a delightful Italian dish you make a day in advance because its flavors marinate together in the refrigerator overnight. It is typically served on Christmas Eve as part of an Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes. But we thought it would go nicely with our meal. You can find the recipe for this wonderful salad courtesy of Gourmet magazine here.
This was followed by the "Primi" (first courses) that are usually served in Italy before the meat dish (which is the main course). Primi are often small, healthy bowls of pasta, completely unlike the oversized, heaping platters of pasta served in too many American restaurants. For this feast, we served two primi: a homemade Italian wedding soup and a pasta dish we called "Two Lonely Spaghetti". This dish consisted of only two strands of 20-inch long spaghetti, intertwined in each other to symbolize our two friends joining for life in a happy union.
The spaghetti was tossed with Porcini mushrooms and Parmigiano in a white wine and herb sauce of our invention. The extra-long spaghetti is imported from Napoli in Southern Italy. You can find it at any Italian import store. It is made by Garofolo and comes in beautifully-designed packaging. It is shown here, for scale, next to a bottle of wine:
The humor in using this novel, extra-long spaghetti will become apparent if you serve this dish after your guests have already had a little too much wine!
For our two main courses we served a zucchini blossom risotto and a roast porkloin stuffed with Prosciutto and Parmigiano. We first ate zucchini blossom risotto many, many years ago on a quiet cobblestone street in Rome. Being nestled in a cozy Trattoria with a fragrant, steaming bowl of this risotto delighting our senses was an experience we shall never forget. This time around, the zucchini blossoms were purchased at our local New York City farmer's market. If you cannot find the blossoms you can also make a wonderful risotto with zucchini.
The pork roast took 2 hours to cook, so we were able to sit down and enjoy our meal while we waited. In the interest of efficiency, we purchased our roast stuffed by a local Italian butcher, but if you would like to do your own there is an excellent blog about how to do this here. We served several "Contorni" (side dishes) including asparagus we had grilled earlier that morning.
Last but not least, we enjoyed a mixed greens salad tossed with homemade pesto and an espresso course with two "dolci": homemade pignoli (pine nut) cookies, biscotti, and olive oil gelato we purchased from a local Italian restaurant. The pignoli cookies were delicious and quite easy to bake. Their recipe can be found here.
When serving a festive meal, go with what feels best, even if you have to buy a hard-to-find ingredient from a restaurant instead of a store. It is the overall experience of the meal, of breaking bread with friends, that matters most. The opportunity to host such a feast for our friends was a joy in itself that erases all the hard labor put in. It is precisely that joy we find in great food, great friends and great art that this blog is all about. We relished each dish and we shared each moment of the feast at this special time in our lives. Congratulations to the happy couple and to feasters everywhere!
