Contributed by Caitlin Cicala, chef of the extraordinary chocolate mousse we enjoyed at our third dinner series, Burgers & Beer.

When looking for inspiration for a new dish, I sometimes like to go to the grocery store or farmers market to see what jumps out at me. Other times, I seek out a dish tailored for a fabulous piece of dinnerware I come across. In this case, that piece of dinnerware was the iittala Essense cocktail bowl. I first saw them about a year ago and thought it would be decadent to eat chocolate mousse in these sleek stemmed bowls. Dinner 3 presented me with the perfect opportunity to finally do it.

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For our third dinner we served organic hamburgers, corn-on-the-cob, salad with pea tendrils, bread, cheese, German potato salad, and a celestial bittersweet chocolate mousse.

The Davis Square farmer’s market in Somerville (May-Nov., Wednesdays 12-6 pm) satisfied most of our produce needs for the dinner party. We picked up some of sweetest corn I’ve ever had from the Nicewicz Family Farm and fresh greens for a salad, including some crisp pea tendrils from Flat’s Mentor Farm.

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As we described in our last post, Dinner 3 was a backyard barbecue featuring fresh local ingredients; from the beer to the potatoes. Check out the photos on our Flickr. In this post we lay out, step by step, our table setting for the evening, which included some great design-conscious products from Chilewich, Libeco, and iittala. We’d love to hear what you think about it in the comments section and we look forward to posting more soon on how everything went.

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We decided on a simple backyard BBQ for our third dinner. Hamburgers, potato salad, a salad of fresh greens from a local farmer’s market, sweet corn cooked in the husk on the grill, a rich bittersweet chocolate mousse for dessert, sangria, and beer out of the growler from the Cambridge Brewing Company. Here are the recipes and expect more information and photographs.

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