After we returned from the farm, we took over Ryan and Michelle’s kitchen to create a Family Dinner.  One of my favorite things about Joe and Lisa is their insane love of food, and over the last few years Joe and I have made some really great meals together.  We don’t do it often, mainly because our respective spouses are the much more logical, reasonable ones, and as a result, they place sound limits on us to keep us from blowing our 401Ks on things like 15 pounds of beef tenderloin, just because we found this bottle of red wine and it totally needed a friend.  A large, beefy, delicious friend.

That being said, whenever Joe and I are released to the wilds of our indulgent tendencies, we tend to savor those moments that much more.  A trip to Polyface to buy up delicious, fresh meats meant, of course, just one of those special, hog-wild occasions.  Behold, some of the dishes from the Family Dinner that resulted:

Pictured above are mezzaluna stuffed with butternut squash and seasoned with a brown butter and rubbed sage sauce.  Mezzaluna literally means “half moon,” in Italian, and they’re kind of in the genre of a ravioli or other small, stuffed pasta.  Joe made a butternut squash puree flavored with nutmeg, parmesan and ricotta, rolled out some pasta dough, and then together we wrapped these mezzaluna. Happily, my skills as a Chinese person came in handy — Italian stuffed pastas are cut from the same cloth as an Chinese jiaozi, so my nimble little fingers felt right at home making them.

As delicious as the mezzaluna were, these two little guys, which we picked up at Polyface, literally right after they were plucked, were the stars of the show:

For dessert, I’d bought some baking pears (pears that are smaller, rounder, and generally more tart than your traditional, juicier pears), and poached them in red wine, a cinnamon stick and some sliced fresh ginger.  Then, Joe added a modified zabaglione:

Because I’m about to move to a place where I hear the weather is one giant, hot, wet blanket all year long, I know I’m going to miss crisp autumn days and the amazing foods that come with it.  Whenever that happens, which I ‘m sure it will, I’ll just look back at this dinner and try to stick my face in these pictures and I’ll think to myself, “Oh, zabaglione, remember that time you were smothered all over my chin and licking you off felt like I was a dog chasing my own tail?  What fun we had!”