Wine Club!

Last night I hosted my sometimes monthly "wine club". A couple years ago a friend of mine got me a set of 24 lectures on wine, and I have (ever so slowly) been making my way through each one. Since there are at least 3 bottles of wine needed for each lecture (to compare and contrast) I thought it best that I not try to go it alone. So every month or so one of the three of us in the "club" host a dinner, and the other two bring the wine! It's very fun, not to mention educational, and I like our small group because it's a very manageable size for planning a dinner. If I had to serve 10 people I think I'd be more hesitant to host, and less inclined to be as creative as I usually am.
This month the lecture was on sparkling wine, and so I tried to prepare my meal to pair with that. Originally I had planned to make something complicated involving three kinds of grilled meat, and do a fancy dessert that included chocolates from the chocolaterie in town, but time and money got in the way of all my grandiose dreams, and so I just made do with what I had, which ended up being much simpler but really perfect for the occasion. It's like they say, sometimes less really is more.
Most of my meal was inspired by my Aunt Pepette in France who showed me how to make more or less everything I served. I changed a few things up, substituted pears for apples, had salad before dinner instead of after etc., but still it pretty much all Aunt Pepette.
So what was on the menu? A tossed mixed green salad with homemade vinaigrette and chicken skewer (and cheese plate on the side), individual Quiche Lorraine/soufflee (quiche without crust), and for dessert homemade crepes with sherry poached pears and dark chocolate! The pears were a total experiment, and so in addition to poaching them in sherry I added cinnamon and vanilla too. They came out pretty tasty I think for my first try, and were really pretty on the plate. I'm going to try to remember what I did and write a recipe for it.
 The only mess up was that I overcooked the chicken because I was trying to clean house and finish dinner at the same time. Other than that I was pleased with how everything came out. And the bubbly was, of course, delicious! All three bottles of it! I took a few photos to share...