Dinner Club 2

Last night was the second meeting of the famous dinner club (recall Flounder and Asparagus Risotto posting). This time around we went to the upper west side to my friend sweet apartment. I'm gonna try to get the recipes which were cooked there and post them, because they were all really really good, and more over they were recipes and preparation techniques I would have never thought to use.
There were three dishes. The main dish was tuna steaks, prepared in a Sicilian manner. Since I don't have the recipe, I'm gonna make some guesses as to exactly how this was done. The tuna was lightly floured. In a large skillet, red onion was cooked until translucent. Then the tuna went onto the pan, and once cooked a little a mixture of white wine, vinegar, bay leaves, olives and yellow raisins was added to the skillet, and the tuna continued to cook in this. The tuna was cooked to medium well done, with still a little pinkishness inside. This preparation was wonderful, as the tuna and onions really took up a lot of the flavors of the mixture. In the past I held the belief that the only good way to prepare tuna is rare, but this would not have been as good if the tuna was rarer.
The second dish was really cute and the most flavorful of the dinner -- it was mushroom bundles. I'm a little sketchier on exactly how this was made. I believe that small mushrooms were precooked until tender, perhaps with some accompanying flavors. Then large collar green leaves were cooked until tender in boiling water. Once cooled, the mushrooms were placed into each leaf, and then a little bundle was constructed. These were placed in the oven sitting on some sort of flavorful sauce and cooked. These bundles were brimming with flavor, and the mushrooms were really tender.
The third dish was brussel sprouts, cook with pistachios until green, but not mushy. The more I have them, the more I like brussel sprouts. They can be great cooked in a wine sauce, or braised, or sauted.... just as long as you don't over cook them, they are really very nice.
Anyway, the dinner was topped off with a watermellon pudding desert, served in a small tea cup with chocolate chips placed around the sides. The flavor was very good, though I do agree with the hosts that arrowroot would have yielded a better consistency. There was a little too much of a corn starch flavor at times. However, I'm a fan of any use of watermellon since its my favorite fruit.
I was very impressed by the quality of food and also by the presentation. When I make food it usually ends up in a large pot.... nothing too pretty. Here the food was in three different serving devices, plus the bundles were a secondary form of food serving device.
I hope that we are not peaking too early with the dinner club. For the next meal I cook, I'm going to really dimish peoples expectations for how good food needs to be ... maybe some food poisoning, or I'll use some spoiled cheese, or maybe I'll try to just use Persimmons, and nothing else.
In any case, I'll try to get the recipes and post them.