And yet another dinner with friends!

   Are you ready for some pictures? I've got a lot! We had another great dinner party with our very good friends. I love when they come over for dinner, it's always a lot of fun, good food, good wine, good conversation, and good laughs. And this time was no different, maybe except for the wine, I mean it was good, but since their unborn baby can come any day now we took it easy on alcohol to stay alert in case we need to drive to the hospital! But who needs wine if you have such a great company?
   As a first course we had... yeah you are right...we had a soup, made out of some awesome dried mushrooms I brought with me from Poland. Just look at them...

 

   I soaked them in cold water for about 5-6 hours, chopped them a little bit, and cooked them in the same water they were soaking with a chicken bullion cube, onions, carrots, small pasta, and lots of parsley and black pepper until the mushrooms were tender. When everything was ready I added a little bit of sour cream for acidity and color.

   Yummy! Since I started with such a Polish soup, I decided to continue with the homeland theme and I made a beef goulash (it may not be a Polish dish but it's so popular over there that we'd like to think it's ours). It's very simple with veggies, bay leaves, juniper berries, salt, and pepper.

   Since it is a Halloween weekend what can be better than serving it with some creepy, purple potatoes and sweet and sour red cabbage (it doesn't get any more Polish than that!).

   I'm getting full just by writing about all this food and adding pictures, so imagine how we felt after eating all of this. We felt like ... having some sweet and delicious dessert and that's exactly what we did. We had coffee (mama had decaf tea!) and freshly baked croissants filed with raspberry jam. Sweet, a little bit sour, flaky and simply a perfect ending to a great dinner with friends!

I hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as we enjoyed eating it!

Magda