13 courses for (almost) Twelfth Night 2015

It's that time of year again - we always have a fabulous dinner with our friends at the start of the year. We get together to make a large tasting menu, in total, 13 dishes. This year, we had the dinner a little early. and we were also a couple short since Dagmar and her husband has recently moved. We hope they'll join us again next year!

We had a lot of ideas for themes but in the end, decided not to have a theme at all. It turned out to be a varied meal, and everything was delicious. Each couple made four dishes, and I added a small snack and a drink, as usual.

Our first course was a drink - Bellini Frutti which was basically sparkling wine with a pur�e of peaches, pink grapefruit and strawberries - and a caraway-spiced crisp bread topped with Dutch Prima Donna cheese and a fig compote.

Next came a spicy gazpacho with a mint ice cream. Different and very fun!

Erika and Micke made a lovely (but hard to photograph) r�sti from sunchokes and potatoes. It was served with crisp bacon, raisins and a caper sauce. I loved it.

My starter was rice crisps - you simply deep fry spring roll wrappers, very fun! - with a mango salsa. I was planning to put lobster on top of this but it smelled a little funky so I didn't dare. It was certainly good on its own! It's also topped with a little bit of soy mayonnaise.

Micke and Erika made what might have been my favorite dish this evening. Arctic char with a beurre blanc and asparagus.

For my main course, I wrapped pork tenderloin in spinach and Parma Ham, and served it with fantastic cognac-laced mushrooms and a lightly pickled salad.

We also had duck, with a sweet grape sauce and a garlicky potato mash.

The final main course was a classic Beef Wellington from Lena. It was really pretty so I wish I had a better photo of it. The sauce was fantastic!

This dish - deep-fried dumplings - was so weird I first wondered if it had been included in the cookbook (Dumplings all day wong by Lee Ann Wong) as a joke. The filling has white chocolate, wasabi and pretzels and on its own, it was pretty horrible. But as it turned out, it was really good! The dumplings took a lot of work, since the pretzels are sharp and prone to poke little holes, so I did a lot of patching.