Favorite Dinner Party

The following recipe is one of my all time things to make for a dinner party. It's easy and delicious and only requires a few ingredients. It does require a little advanced planning as it's best to make the sauce part in the morning and let it sit at room temperature for at least 8 hours. Serve with warm crusty bread, and a beautiful fresh salad and dinner is served.

Helpful hints:
To remove the rind from the wheel of brie it's best to put it in the freezer for 10-15 minutes or until it's firm so you can slice it off, and cut up the brie. Buy good brie, triple creme if you can find it. It's a little more expensive than the double creme but well worth it.

I love garlic, it's easy to want to add more than 3 cloves to this recipe...don't. The sauce doesn't actually "cook", so the garlic stays very potent; 3 cloves is plenty-use 2 if you're not a huge garlic fan. (speaking from experience here on this one...)

You must use vine ripe tomatoes or very fresh tomatoes from a garden or farmers market to even be worth making this dish. Same for basil. Because there are so few ingredients, you need to use the freshest you can find. Those tomatoes you find in the grocery store that are hard as rocks will not cut it for this dish; even if you let them ripen. (please don't try with canned tomatoes)

The easiest way to cut basil is to stack up the leaves, roll them up into a roll, and slice across the roll. You'll end up with thin slices that are perfect. For those of you interested-this is called a julienne.

This recipe is easy to halve for 2 people and have some for lunch the next day. It's actually better the next day as the sauces flavors have come together even more and it's soaked into pasta (if you've over cooked the pasta you may be able to get away with serving it that night, but with the leftovers you'll notice that it's become very mushy)

Brie Pasta (serves about 4-6)
1 lb of Brie (rind removed and cut into cubes)
3-4 medium tomatoes diced (or as much or little as you'd like)
2-3 cloves of garlic minced
good handful of fresh basil leaves sliced into thin strips
olive oil

pound of linguine

salt and pepper to taste

Combine the brie, diced tomatoes, garlic basil leaves in a bowl and toss gently. Pour about 1/2 cup of olive oil on top, sprinkle with a little salt, and let this sit at room temperature for at least 8 hours. Don't worry the brie will be fine, and it won't come together if you try and refrigerate it.

When you're ready for dinner boil a very large pot of salted water. Cook the pasta until it's almost done, it should still have some bit to it and it will cook further when you finish up the dish. Before you drain the pasta save about a cup of the cooking water...this will come in handy. After draining the pasta return it to the pot and pour the brie mixture on top, the heat from the pasta will start to melt the cheese. Add the saved pasta water as needed to thin the sauce enough to melt and coat the linguine. Salt and pepper to taste. Serve with freshly grated Parmesan cheese.

That's it! Dinner is served.

I first had this dish one summer while at the beach. A family I babysat for in high school used to take me to the outter banks every summer. Their mother was a wonderful cook, and it was the family tradition that she would make this the first night we were there. She'd make the sauce as her husband was packing the car the morning we left, and by the time we got down there and settled it was the perfect dinner. I know that she got this recipe from a cookbook that was complied by a restaurant, but I have no idea what the cookbook was. I stopped using the recipe years ago.

Last year while in Germany, Brian and I decided that each of us would cook dinner one night for the family that we stayed with. Brian being the expert chef that he is said that they would not like this dish, that they don't eat food like this, that not every one is a "food snob" like me, blah blah blah. I said fine then I'll roast a couple chickens to serve with it, and if they don't like it then they can just eat chicken. I'm not even sure if I had real Brie...I could not find a translation and I just picked what looked to be the closest thing to Brie out of the cheese case at...of all places WalMart. Anyhow everyone enjoyed dinner and ate it so I figured it couldn't have been that bad. About a week after we returned to the states my phone rang at 6:15 on a Saturday morning. It was our host calling for the recipe. I stopped listening to Brian about what he thought people would or would not eat at my dinner parties after that.