Too Much, but Tasty

• Seeds: spicy candied squash seeds (see dessert). Failed; either this species of squash has the wrong kind of seed, or they need to be cooked more, or cooked more slowly, or something. Oh well. The margaritas meant for this course and the next were tasty.
• Pork Pork: a small cube of wild boar bacon, dusted with ancho, smoked paprika, and adobo and carefully sauteed, with a small serving of picadillo and some jicama sticks.
• Salad: boucheron, fresh figs, warm sauteed hedgehog mushrooms, apple, mesclun from Maggie's farm, with warm sherry vinaigrette.
• Comfort food: a duck confit leg, sitting on a scallion dipped in hoisin sauce, sitting on a corn cake; potato-fennel gratin; carrot-coriander puree.
• Trout, wrapped in applewood-smoked bacon, on a bed of crushed grapes (olive oil, pepper), with roasted baby summer squash.
• Squash pie.

Too much! Too much! There's something satisfying in that old-country invocation: it's company, there ought to be too much. Someone might be hungry. And, once committed to the picadillo and the pie, you're going to be in the kitchen early: why not. And those white trout looked great in the market (and they were pretty good, while providing a dramatic demonstration of the ability of the fume hood to handle a lot of drama).

I kept the picadillo in the first course to a mere taste. But it's still a lot of food.