June 21st - Cafe Davis opens!

We celebrated Summer Solstice and the beginning of Cafe Davis with a great group of friends. I spent the day preparing for Cafe Davis by essentially not preparing at all - I hope dinner didn't seem like an after-thought to our guests, but we were ridiculously busy that day. We spent all last week with Mike's dad, Casey, renovating our garage. We're turning it into a detached family room, and much of the 21st was spent in a last-minute push to get the drywall up. I also learned how to tape drywall, and that' what I'll be doing all this week. It's not all that difficult, and I'll just throw it out there now that if any of you all ever need drywall assistance in the future, just let me know! I'll be happy to help. But I digress... back to Cafe Davis. So, before the drywalling commenced, Mike, Sean Lowry, and I met at 8am to go to the Harrisonburg Farmer's Market to get ingredients for dinner. I bought green beans, garlic, and delicious gorgonzola bread at the market. At 4:00 when I gave up on drywalling, I went to Martin's to buy the rest of the ingredients. Unfortunately we're not at the point in the garden yet where most ingredients can be super local, but we're close. So I got the rest of the stuff at the grocery store - the fennel came from Mexico; I'm not sure of the origins of the mushrooms or the citrus. Like I said at the beginning - I can't guarantee that everythng will be local, but I can at least try. I did make a flower arrangement for the living room from plants in our yard instead of buying flowers. The arrangement included yarrow, lavender, and Japanese maple. Then dinner time finally rolled around - guests for the evening included Bill Kimsey, chair of the Speech Communication Department at JMU, Sean Lowry (garage renovation helper extraordinaire), Sarah Smitherman and Tom Robinson (more awesome renovation helpers!), and their friends David and Chrystal Lawrence who were visiting from outside of London. It was wonderful to meet new people from across the Atlantic (where they say Cafe Davis is huge... yeah right!) Dinner was the aforementioned gorgonzola bread; roasted fennel and pepper salad; farfalle pasta with pancetta, mushrooms, and sage; green beans with orange essence; and we had a white bean dip with crackers that I bought at the farmer's market for an appetizer. The 1st bottle of wine was a Cardinal Point Reisling. The Cardinal Point winery is down near Afton Mountain in either Albemarle or Nelson County (can't remember which), and I recommend pretty much all of their wines. They are consistently good across the board. The second bottle of wine was a Cabernet Sauvignon made by Colin and left at our house when he took off for the wildlands of Maine. Sarah made a delicious "candy bar" pie (actually Snickers) that was really rich and chocolately and yummy. Afterhours of Cafe Davis was in the basement of Clementine - all but Bill headed over there around 10:30pm for a few drinks. That's pretty much it - I have some pictures on Sean's camera that I will hopefully post soon. We look forward to seeing you all as the Cafe Davis season wears on! Oh, and David asked me to promote his t-shirt business. He makes t-shirts of places featured in TV shows and movies - like Bushwood Country Club in Caddyshack; the pizza place in The Sopranos; etc. The t-shirts are really great - Mike will be helping him come up with ideas to expand his inventory, so check in frequently and buy often!