It started with the smell.

I arrived home from work Friday night, Nuni in tow, and was greeted by a smell, emanating from the kitchen. A TERRIBLE smell. It wasn’t the trash — Friday is trash day, and ours was empty as a result. Knowing that we had four people coming over to our house the next day for a fancy dinner party, Ken and I spent Friday night tearing apart the kitchen, scrubbing every surface, and spraying Lysol with abandon, trying to find and eradicate the source of the smell. An overnight with the windows open and a generous application of Lysol had relegated the smell to the background, but I should have known then that this was a harbinger of things to come.

When I saw the Project Food Blog Round 3 Challenge, throw a luxury dinner party, I thought, “No sweat.” I had just had twenty people over to my house for a three year old birthday party. I was channeling Martha Stewart. How hard can dinner for six be? I invited friends and proceeded to plan a menu.

When it comes to menu planning for a dinner party, the three principles to keep in mind are timing, balance, and cohesion. Timing — You don’t want to spend the entire party in the kitchen, so meals that require lots of last minute fiddling are inadvisable. Balance — although it’s tempting to load up on rich dishes at a fancy dinner party, you don’t want your guests to feel like they have to roll home. Think about finding a balance between heavier dishes and lighter ones — dishes that lull the palate and those that wake it up. Finally, think about cohesion. Unless you have a theme of eclecticism, you might want to think twice before serving miso soup followed by tacos. In a good menu, each course should feel like it belongs together and proceeds logically from the previous one.

I knew from the moment I read the prompt that I wanted to make tarte tatin, the classic French upside down apple tart. It can be made in advance and is always impressive and delicious. Tarte Tatin heavily features butter and apples, two specialties of the Normandy region of France, which led me to decide on a main course — Pork Tenderloin cooked “a la Normande” – with butter, apples and cream. Looking for both balance and cohesion in the rest of the menu, I decided to go with an apple theme, alternating the richer courses (Pork Normande, Tarte Tatin, and hors d’oeuvres of a creamy chicken liver pate and a cheese spread both served on apple slices) with lighter fare (a beet and apple carpaccio with horseradish cream and an endive and apple salad to clear the palate before dessert). Once I had set the menu, I turned to the experts for wine pairing advice — in this case my aunt Suzi, who used to work at a winery and is a fabulous cook to boot. The menu was set.

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