Limoncello

We recently had a long awaited dinner at our neighbor’s home.  The dinner was promised once our neighbor’s returned home from a vacation in Europe.  They would provide us dinner and we would view their pictures (we were actually looking forward to this night).  Two years later, the pictures are now copied to DVDs, and we enjoyed a great evening of food, beverages, and sharing stories around their trip.

We started the evening with an appetizer of cheese, crackers, grapes and some Belgium Ale while we looked at some of the post cards the couple gathered on their trip.

While we continued to chat, the husband add the prepared chicken skewers to the corn on the cob already grilling on the barbeque. 

Once the chicken was cooked, we enjoyed a wonderful dinner with the chicken, corn, green salad, red potato salad, and bread.  While we ate the salad and in the spirit of the residents of the Czech Republic, we all enjoyed a small glass of apricot liqueur the couple brought back from Europe.  The chilled liqueur was very light and complimented the flavor of the salad.

After dinner, we watched one of the videos of their European trip, which we thoroughly enjoyed.  With one video competed, it was time for some dessert.  Dessert was homemade blueberry cobbler with vanilla ice cream.  Yum!

Once our blueberry cobbler was finished, we were able to taste two different kinds limoncello the couple brought back from Sorrento Italy.  The bottles were interesting as they nestled into each other and glued together with a plastic representation of lemons and leaves.  The first bottle contained straight limoncello, the second held a limoncello in cream.

We sampled the straight limoncello first.  It had the refreshing taste of lemons with a slight citrus bite.  Next, we tried the limoncello in cream.  It had a similar flavor to the straight limoncello, but the cream tempered the citrus so it was very smooth on the tongue.  With our dessert and after dinner liqueurs finished, we watched another video of the second part of their trip. 

The dinner took two years to accomplish, and we feel honored that this couple saved several bottles of liqueurs from their trip to share with us.  Now if I could just get my friend in Germany to send me a bottle of the Kräuterhex from Oberammergau, we could respond in kind.

The limoncello was very good and a little goes a long way.  I found there are quite a few recipes on the internet, I may need to try one, and we can see how it compares to the limoncello from Italy.  That’s a project for another day.

Adventures In Food: Author: Kerry Howell