Fall Party

My roommate and I threw a party last weekend and invited our Boston friends (I apologize to my CT friends who are reading this.... you know I'll invite you all up soon). I love throwing parties because it gives me a chance to try out new recipes, to see what works and what doesn't, and also to visit with friends.

We spent the week before the party running to IKEA and Pier 1 to get the last-minute items that would make our apartment look put together. We have these orange hanging lights and a red rug in our kitchen so we complemented these with some orange striped towels and orange placemats, pumpkins, pumpkin tealights, and pillows. Once they decorating was out of the way, we were able to concentrate on the food!

Friday night when we got out of work, we ran to two different grocery stores in search of all of our ingredients. We were finally home and ready to cook around 10 pm. We stayed up until 3 o'clock in the morning making mini quiches, sausage and potato puffs (recipe from Food & Wine), and some goat cheese and fig tartlets laced with honey (recipe from the Better Homes & Gardens Christmas Cookies issue).

Our Saturday cooking started at 9 am. I made the stuffing for my mushrooms (olive oil, onions, spinach, garlic, and breadcrumbs for the vegetarian ones, and add sausage and ground beef to that for the rest of them), and my roommate made some pizza roll/calzone things. One was stuffed with sauce, cheese, and pepperoni and the other with turkey, ham, and cheese.

I rolled asparagus and cream cheese in honey ham and lined all the rolls up on a sheet pan so they could be popped in the oven just as our guests were arriving.

And then I sat at the table and cleaned chicken breasts, chopped them in small chunks and coated each chunk with flour, egg, and breadcrumb. These I threw into a plastic bag to be spread on the pan after the asparagus came out of the oven to bake into little chicken nuggets. I figured I needed to have one non-fussy dish.

We put together a cheese platter and a fruit platter, and set out some chocolate. I made a tiramisu cheese ball and some pumpkin dip to satisfy all the dessert lovers. I made a cranberry lemonade for the punch bowl (from Williams-Sonoma Thanksgiving book) and some hot apple cider for the crock pot. We had wine and beer and knew our friends would be bringing more. Plates, cups, and napkins were arranged, tea lights were lit, and we were ready for company.

I was serving some of the rice balls my mom and I made a couple of weeks ago. I had those thawed and made a simple tomato sauce (recipe from Orangette) and a garlic parmesan cream sauce (from my roommate's Sauces & Dips cookbook). When these were ready I kept them on low heat, warmed the rice balls in the oven and then set the sauces out in little bowls near the rice balls.

We took our mini quiches, cut them into wedges and displayed them on my three-tiered dish along with some sprigs of thyme and rosemary.

I rewarmed the sausage and potato puffs and set those out. And then our guests arrived. My roommate and I tried to play hostess and finish everything up. The mushrooms were just coming out of the oven, and we assembled the last thing we had wanted to make: a pear and gorgonzola ciabatta pizza (recipe from epicurious.com). My roommate had made a walnut pesto in the food processort earlier, so we spread that on halved ciabatta bread and topped it with havarti slices. We broiled this, then added prosciutto, pears, gorgonzola, and arugula, and popped it back in the oven until melty. This pizza was the hit of the night... and it was the first time we made it too.

Once I get better at this, I'll start embedding links to the recipes and putting pictures in the midst of my text, but for now, here are a few of pictures:




The Cheese Platter




Pear and Gorgonzola Ciabatta Pizza




Next-Day Leftovers (includes mini quiches, bacon dip brought by my friend Erin, ciabatta pizza, sausage and potato puffs, and some grapes)

I didn't take enough pictures during the party, and so much of the food disappeared before I really had a chance to. I am going to try to get better at this!

Fried Rice

I got a rice cooker for my birthday. It's really a great thing to have. I started off making plain white rice, but tonight I went a step farther and made fried rice. I took some freshly made white rice and put it in the fridge to cool, and then I followed directions on a seasoning packet I had gotten at the grocery store. (The packet says to use cold rice, but it was already 9:45 and I hadn't eaten dinner yet, so I admit I didn't let it cool completely. I don't think it made a difference.) I crisped bacon, stir-fried scallions, and then scrambled an egg into them. Then I added the rice I had recently made and the seasonings. Deviating from the recipe slightly, I threw in some cooked corn, and dinner was ready!

Next time I plan to put in a bunch more veggies. The scallions were nice, but onions would give much more flavor to the rice. I might also try some peas and broccoli. Maybe mushrooms? And I was thinking if I wanted something even heartier, I could use chicken or ham along with the bacon. And I think an extra egg would be nice as well.

All in all, it came out pretty good for the first try though, and I'd rather make this version than order it from the Chinese restaurant any day!

My roommate and I enjoyed it as we watched the Red Sox beat the Indians!

Quiche

I made my first quiche Sunday night. My aunt makes quiche every Christmas Eve, and I absolutely love it, so last time I saw her, I asked for her recipe. She makes a spinach quiche and a quiche Lorraine. I most enjoy the quiche Lorraine, so that's what I attempted.

She makes a very simple crust consisting of flour, water, egg, butter, and salt, which I mixed with my hands and pressed into a quiche dish.

Because the recipe was hand written and quickly done, the instructions weren't exactly in order, and I know next time that I should start cooking my bacon and onions before I make the crust, so that there isn't any waiting time in between.

So after my crust was done, I cooked bacon and then sauteed onions in the bacon grease. I chopped up the bacon and sprinkled it on the crust and covered it with onions.

Then I mixed up egg, cream, salt and pepper, and Gruyere, and poured it all over the bacon and onion. I popped the quiche dish in the oven, and 25 minutes later, my roommate and I were eating warm, cheesy quiche.

It came out quite well for a first attempt, and I can't wait to try the spinach one and then experiment with some other fillings. Once you get a basic quiche down, you can pretty much add anything!

A Day Of Cooking

I spent all day Saturday at my parents' house cooking with my mom. The morning started with a trip to Starbucks for some instant energy and then to Stop & Shop to pick up all of our ingredients. We decided that it would be the perfect day to make things that could be frozen and taken out for meals in the coming weeks or months. Our list: sauce, stuffed peppers, stuffed cabbage, stuffed shells, rice balls, and meat loaf.


We started off by chopping and sauteing onions, which we knew were needed in almost every dish. I cleaned peppers, and my mom steamed cabbage. We also had the rice cooker going.


The meat loaf consisted of ground beef, ground pork, breadcrumbs, sauteed carrots and onions, salt and pepper, eggs, and Worcestershire sauce. After mixing all of this together, I shaped little loaves, wrapped them, and put them in the freezer. One down.


In a huge stock pot, we started the sauce with a generous pour of olive oil and some onions. Next came the garlic, and several cans of crushed tomatoes and tomato sauce. We also added fresh basil from the garden. We cooked some sweet Italian sausage and some pork ribs. Once they were ready, we cut the sausages in half and dumped the ribs and sausage into the sauce, juices and all. Next, we made meatballs. These were ground beef, ground pork, cubed bread, eggs, onions, and salt and pepper. I cooked these and added them to the sauce. We left the sauce to simmer for the rest of the day, giving it an occasional stir.

For the stuffed cabbage, we mixed up ground beef, rice, and some seasonings. We carefully placed small handfuls of meat into cabbage leaves and wrapped the leaves around the meat, making sure to tuck in the sides. To go with these, we made a sauce consisting of tomato soup, tomato sauce, brown sugar, onions, and vinegar. We spread the sauce in the bottom of a glass dish, placed the cabbages in it, and then poured more sauce over the top. While these were in the oven, we worked on the stuffed peppers.

We used green peppers and stuffed them with a mixture of ground beef (we bought a lot of ground beef that morning!), rice, diced red peppers, onions, and tomatoes. These we topped with a plain tomato sauce and slid into the oven.

Once the cabbages and peppers were cooked off and cooled, we wrapped them (packages of two for me and packages of six for mom) and put them in the freezer.

I boiled some water for the shells, and we combined ricotta, Parmesan, Romano, egg, onions sauteed with basil and olive oil, and salt and pepper. We stuffed as many shells as we could and then put the broken ones in a glass dish and stirred the rest of the ricotta mixture into them. My mom then added sauce and meat to the dish and made a sort of mini casserole, not unlike lasagna. We froze the shells in quantities of six or eight and wrapped the casserole and froze that as well.

At this point it was about 8 p.m. We were tired from cooking all day, but we had not yet made the rice balls. Being that these are the most difficult of all we were making that day, we probably shouldn't have saved them for last . . . but they had to be done. I emptied the contents of the rice cooker into a large bowl, added eggs, grated Romano, salt and pepper, and onion powder. My mom browned some ground beef and sausage and cut up some sharp cheddar cheese.

Rice balls take some patience. You have to take a mound of the sticky rice mixture and pat it flat in your hand, then take some of the ground beef, sausage, and cheddar cheese and place it in the middle of the rice. Then you wrap the rice around the meat and cheese, pulling off any excess and being careful not to let any of the meat show through the sides. After I had gotten a plateful of these done, my mom took them and rolled them in egg and breadcrumb and fried them in oil. We proceeded like this until the huge bowl was emptied of rice.

I froze about thirty of these in a glass baking dish, as I plan to use them for an upcoming gathering. I am still deciding what sauces I'm going to serve with them. They are great with tomato sauce, but I want something else as well, perhaps a cream sauce of some sort.

10 p.m. Finished!

Now picture that we were doing all of this in a kitchen and dining room that are in the midst of being remodeled. We worked on folding tables, had no counter space, and used the stove in the middle of the kitchen floor (the walls had been painted the day before). Washing dishes was a project as there was no room next to the sink to put anything.

This was certainly a long day, but I got to learn a lot of my mom's recipes, and I have a full freezer. It will be nice to take some meat loaf out in the morning to thaw, get home from work on a cold evening, and have a delicious warm meal.

The First Dish

I made fondue this weekend. This isn't the first time I've attempted it, but it is the first time I was really pleased with the outcome.

I go to Cape Cod every Columbus Day weekend with my mom and any other family members and friends who feel like going. This year my two brothers, one of my sisters, my parents' neighbor, and her daughter joined my mom and me.

We usually try to plan a few meals so that we don't spend too much money eating out. The cool, crisp fall weather that has finally started setting in reminded me of my fondue set, and I offered to make a fondue for one of our meals.

I have one of those fondue pots that is meant for broth or oil fondues, not cheese or chocolate. After a few burnt cheese fondues, I finally realized this, and so with this attempt, I decided to set my fondue pot up as a double boiler. (I must confess: I got this idea while dining at The Melting Pot.) I filled the fondue pot with water and set a small stainless steel bowl in it. While the water started heating up, I made the fondue on the stove top, which is actually the way fondue is typically made. When I first started looking at fondue recipes, I was surprised to learn that none of them instructed me to make the fondue in the pot, at least none of the cheese recipes.

I found two recipes from Gourmet on Epicurious.com and sort of combined them. I caramelized shallots, added some pinot grigio, some Gruyere, and some Emmental, and voila, I had fondue.

I transferred some of the fondue to the fondue pot. Because the water wasn't quite hot enough at this point, the cheese started to congeal. I removed the cover from the flame and got the water boiling, and the cheese started to melt again. At this point, the pot had been dipped into enough that I could refill it with the hot cheese that was still on the stove. After that, everything went smoothly.

My fellow fondue eaters and I had arranged bread chunks (french and sourdough), steamed asparagus and broccoli, boiled potatoes, cubed steak, and lobster around the fondue pot. We soon discovered that it all went so well with the cheese. We were also having salad, and I drizzled some of the cheese over my tomatoes. It was wonderful.

I watched my 12-year-old brother -- who had made faces at the fondue and swore he wouldn't go near it -- sneak bread chunks into the pot of gooey cheese.

I tried to convince my very picky sister that there were no onions in the cheese; after all, they were shallots. But she didn't believe me and casually replied, "When we went through the self checkout at Stop & Shop, it said, 'Please remove your onions.'" Oh well, more fondue for the rest of us.

The thing with fondue is that it's not just about cooking; it's about the experience and the people you get to share it with. I think having family and friends there to try it with me made it especially delicious.

The Dish On Me

I decided to start a blog because I talk about food so much it drives my friends and family crazy. You can't get down a street with me without my pointing out some restaurant I have been to or heard about. Sometimes I'll be in the middle of a conversation with a group of people, and I'll realize that we've all been talking about food . . . and it's my fault! I can't help it. Think Catherine Zeta-Jones in No Reservations.

If someone says, "I'm going to Philly," I'll say, "You have to go to Jim's at the corner of South and 4th! And don't forget to check out the Reading Terminal Market. The pork dumplings are amazing!"





If someone mentions apple picking, I start rattling off pies, cakes, cookies, muffins, and cupcakes. When I think about throwing a party, I think first about what sort of food I can serve. Am I going to make finger foods? Should there be desserts? (Wait, what kind of question is that? Always dessert!) How will everything fit together? Can I create some sort of food theme?






The running joke in my family is that I always show up at my parents' house right when a meal is being put on the table. I take that to mean I have impeccable timing. I think they just think I'm a crazy foodie. P.S. My dad is a chef and my mom cooks incredibly well, so who wouldn't show up at dinnertime?

I had to see Ratatouille as soon as it came out. A Disney movie . . . about food! Who can pass that up? And what's more, when I got home, like so many others, I had to make ratatouille. "Anyone can cook!"

So I don't just talk about food, I cook too. I love trying out new recipes. I have shelves full of cookbooks, a box filled with recipe cards from various family members and other sources, and subscriptions to Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, and even Every Day with Rachael Ray. For healthier recipes, I turn to Women's Health. I borrow Gourmet from my mom when she finishes with it, and I often pick up Martha Stewart Living or Real Simple at the checkout because of some fabulous food porn on the cover. I made that red, white, and blue shortcake featured on Martha's July cover!

I visit Epicurious.com almost daily. I consume books about food. Garlic and Sapphires quickly became one of my favorites. Julie & Julia partly inspired me to start this blog. Orangette, a food blog that I read quite frequently, also motivated me to start my own.

Ooh, and I am a big fan of Top Chef. Of course, I was a bigger fan before Hung won, but we'll save that for another time. As for the Food Network, I love it. Giada tops my list, and I own all of her cookbooks.

I have this passion for food. I love to cook it, to talk about it, and of course to eat it. I hope this blog will become a catalog of my successes and failures in the kitchen, of my critiques of restaurants, and of my thoughts on various cookbooks and recipes, and, most important, just somewhere to chat about food.

Welcome.