Five Food Related Topics for Friday

1. First Attempt at Tuna Salad: Bolstered by everyone’s suggestions Monday, I bought some solid white tuna and made tuna salad. I used the America’s Test Kitchen recipe as a jumping off point, and then added red bell pepper. I also substituted pickle juice for pickles (I don’t like pickles in my tuna salad, although I do like celery and red onion), ignored the request that I add fresh parsley (parsley can die in a fire), and squeezed on some lemon juice. I also add capers to my sandwich before eating, although I don’t like mixing capers into the tuna salad itself for reasons I haven’t fully excavated from my soul. I sort of squinted so that the tuna in the can was blurry, and then added it to a mixing bowl and immediately put the other ingredients on top of it and stirred everything together so I didn’t have to think about the color of the tuna. It turned out okay. I think the tuna salad I love has more mayonnaise than I am willing to add to my own tuna salad, because I ostensibly don’t like mayonnaise. 

Next time, I will use more mayonnaise and less mustard; I can put mustard on the bread. I also want to make this mini focaccia because I like tuna salad on focaccia. 

2. Finger Food: In addition to tuna salad, I have been thinking about food a lot this week because we are having guests for the Super Bowl. There is almost nothing I like better than an excuse to make a bunch of fun and tasty appetizers that can be eaten in front of the TV.

We are having two guests, which brings the total of people who will presumably be eating food to five, although counting Carla is probably dumb because she will only eat chips and guacamole, nothing else. (She asked me to buy TWO bags of Lays and TWO bags of Tostitos because she is anticipating a LOT of chip eating.) Keep that in mind as I lay out all the many, many things I am slavering over. We will probably do one of the below things, plus some veggies. Our guests are bringing meatballs. And my husband is making seven layer dip (with taco meat and without olives) because that is the food that is calling to his heart. 

• Air Fryer Bang Bang Salmon Bites: At various points my Instagram feed seems FULL of people making delicious looking salmon bites in the air fryer. I would love to try these and they seem perfect for a party. 

• Bunless Cheeseburger Bites: These are adorable and they have the added benefits of being carb-free AND something that Carla would potentially eat. I am not crazy about making burgers in a frying pan though… if only I had additional air fryers to call into service.
• 
  Air Fryer Buffalo Cauliflower: I am not much for buffalo wings, but I do love spicy cauliflower.

• Mini Crabcakes: I really, really want to eat some crabcakes on Sunday and found a package of mini ones in my grocery store’s freezer section. But the price is deterring me. I could make them on my own. But… after the cost of crab claw meat and then making them myself, I wonder if it might not come out to more hassle than it’s worth?

• Air Fryer Artichoke Hearts: Why does this sound so delicious??? I think only I and one of our guests will eat these, so probably they won’t make the final cut. But I am eyeing them!

• Endive with Goat Cheese and Candied Nuts: I had this appetizer at a party a million years ago and it was so fresh and delicious and it is VERY EASY to make. You dollop some goat cheese on an endive leaf, add a few candied nuts, and then drizzle with balsamic reduction. This recipe that includes blood oranges sounds appealing, too. 

• Spinach Artichoke Zucchini Bites: YUM. If I can find some pre-made spinach and artichoke dip at the grocery store, I might do these in addition to whatever else I choose. 

Are you planning to watch the Super Bowl? If so, what kind of snacks do you hope to eat? If not, what’s your favorite party appetizer to make or eat? 

3. Valentine’s Sweets: The Super Bowl will be followed closely by Valentine’s Day. Carla is SO INTO Valentine’s Day this year, and I love it. She and I scrolled through a billion options online for her to buy for her classmates and then she also made everyone a friendship bracelet. She filled all of them out the day they arrived in the mail. She also wanted a special Valentine’s Day outfit, and, while we were unable to track down the ideal dress she had in her mind (which I think was a floor length gown of tulle and sequins, which I expressly said she could not wear to school), we did find some adorable pink clothing at Target that she has already set aside for The Day. 

This is all to say that I am very into making Valentine’s cookies this year. I really want to make two kinds of cookies. Well, in reality, I want to make three or more kinds of cookies and then make up Valentine’s Day cookie plates for all our neighbors but that seems a little extra even for me. So I have reined it in to two varieties. I am pretty sure I want to make these stripey heart cookies because they are darling. However, I have made them in the past and if memory and my blog serve me, they were somewhat prettier than they were delicious. 

I definitely want to make something chocolate. Carla’s old standby is the chocolate snickerdoodle, which I think is delicious and also fun because it is unusual. But my husband isn’t a huge fan of them. Perhaps these brownie crinkle cookies would be good instead? The idea of a brownie in cookie form is delightful. These cinnamon cookies with Red Hots are very appealing to me as well, not in small part because they have cream cheese frosting and I adore a frosted cookie. But I’m not sure where I would find Red Hots? They aren’t something I’ve seen in awhile. I have been tossing around the idea of making raspberry macarons. I haven’t made macarons in a long while and they are delicious and festive. (But also kind of fussy.)

I could always go the cupcake route instead of cookies. Carla has been talking about Nutella quite a bit lately, and these strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate cupcakes are filled with Nutella. I would vastly prefer to make vanilla cupcakes with raspberry filling and raspberry buttercream – but maybe if I make the Nutella ones I won’t eat them all. 

If you make sweets especially for Valentine’s Day, what is your favorite?

4. Grocery Store Swap: Since I have successfully reintroduced yogurt into my diet (hooray!!!!) I have been testing out different yogurt varietals. My current favorite is the Fage 0% blended cherry yogurt. (I cannot stand fruit on the bottom yogurt.) But I can only find it at one specific grocery store, so I have completed rejiggered my shopping schedule to make that store my preferred store. Fortunately, it is near my friend’s house, and we usually go to her house once a week for a writing session, so it’s not wildly out of the way. But I feel slightly neurotic for rearranging my grocery shopping life around yogurt. It’s better than going to multiple stores, right?  

5. Feedly: Okay, so this isn’t TECHNICALLY food-related. But I have been noticing that Feedly is increasingly unreliable. I completely missed a post by Nicole yesterday because it didn’t show up in my feed. Sometimes people’s posts show up late or three times in a row. Sometimes I will see a week’s worth of posts all in a row, as though someone posted them all in one day. A few commenters have noted that some of my posts don’t show up until a day or two later. (Edited to add: I follow my own blog on Feedly and as of 6:00 pm on Friday, my post still has not shown up in my feed. SIGH.)

This all sounds like a really good argument to finally add an old-school style blog roll to my blog, so I don’t miss anyone’s posts. I have been thinking about doing it for a long time, more than a YEAR… but haven’t, mainly because I’m afraid of missing someone and hurting feelings. But that’s silly, right? If I miss your blog, you will know it’s purely a brain failure and not that I don’t adore you and your blog? And you will alert me immediately? My current “systems” – the unreliable Feedly or having everyone’s blogs bookmarked in a browser – are not working. And I don’t want to miss your posts!

How are you keeping up with the blogs you follow?

That’s all I’ve got for this Friday, Internet. Hope you have a delicious weekend. 

Read Full Post »

Halloween Report

Today we have a wind advisory and hail, with snow coming over night. I absolutely HATE wind, but I suppose the swirling leaves and unsettled skies — plus the queasy feeling they give me, as I imagine the tree crashing through our roof — are a good metaphor for how I’m feeling about the impending election.

Fortunately, yesterday was PERFECT for outdoor entertaining. High 40s, and, best of all, SUNSHINE. The big yellow maple which leans over our backyard from our neighbor’s was practically glowing in all the sun. (Its branches, already today, are nearly bare, and the big yellow leaves are scattered all over our yard.) The sky was blue, the air was fresh and only slightly breezy. Our yard was squashy from all the rain we’ve been getting, but the kids all wore rainboots. Their costumes got very muddy indeed, but they had a lot of fun.

I am willing to admit this looks more like a moldy cherry than a jack-o-lantern, but we do our best with the gifts and number of cups we possess.

The Poke a Prize game I created was a big hit. (It would be really fun to do for almost any birthday party or holiday – you’d just adjust the colors and shape you create accordingly.) It was also a LOT of work. First, I bought a bunch of little treats: candy, of course, but also spider rings and pumpkin erasers, and mini notebooks and hair clips and other little things I thought the girls would like. These LOL mini surprise balls were the biggest hit. Filling the cups was easy. Assembling the board, less so. I misunderstood the directions and bought crepe paper instead of orange napkins to disguise the cups and the prizes within, and it took me a million years to wrap each cup in crepe paper. A million. Years. Then our hot glue gun didn’t work, so I had to Gorilla Glue the cups to the poster board. And then a few cups refused to accept the Gorilla Glue, so I had to duct tape those on. It was a lot of work. Fortunately, since I didn’t have a birthday party to stress about this year, I had lots of pent-up craftiness to put toward this project. Carla helped me cut out letters, a stem, and a leaf to glue to the board.

My plan had been to just have the kids take turns poking the cups and extracting the prizes, but my husband suggested that we make the game a little more challenging to make it more FUN. So Carla and I cut up little pieces of paper and wrote on them either “TREAT! Poke a prize!” or “TRICK!” and then a little activity they had to do before they could poke a prize. Things like, “Hop like a bunny!” and “Yell the ABCs!” and “Go down the slide!” The kids drew a slip of paper from a trick-or-treat pumpkin bucket, read the instruction, and collected their prizes. They had a really good time. 

They also enjoyed their “treasure hunt,” which was just running around the yard collecting the 15 little goodie bags I’d filled with candy, barrettes, and Halloween-themed erasers. 

The food was good. Our kitchen table is right next to the sliding doors that lead to the porch, so I just set up the crockpot and other food on the table, and people could just barely enter our house to fill their plates. Usually, I feel like I make way too much food. But there was practically nothing left by the time our friends went home, so I think everything went over well.

This chicken, mushroom, and wild rice soup won a lot of praise from my friends, which was very gratifying. The recipe makes a TON of soup, and it was all gone by the end of the evening. The six of us GOBBLED it up. If you need a warm, hearty fall/winter soup that you can cook in the crockpot, I cannot recommend this enough. The hardest part of this soup is chopping the veggies for the mirepoix and the mushrooms. Also, near the end you make a quick roux and add milk and half and half to thicken the soup, and that’s a teeny bit of a pain. Otherwise, it is super easy. Despite some comments on the recipe saying that the rice gets mushy after eight hours in the crockpot, I use Lundberg wild rice, and just dump it in at the beginning like the recipe says, and it has always come out perfectly. Also, the recipe suggests putting the mushrooms in 30 minutes before the end of cooking, and I do NOT do that — I just put them in with everything else right at the beginning — and it has always turned out beautifully. 

The daughters of our friends BOTH ate the soup, which seems miraculous to me. I think I’ve been able to cajole Carla to try a bite of tomato soup ONCE EVER and certainly she would never, ever even THINK of trying a soup with a bunch of stuff in it. 

The tried-and-true miracle no-knead bread was also a crowd pleaser. If you like bread, and if you like appearing to be a person who makes very fancy gourmet bread, then you MUST try this recipe. It is the easiest thing ever. Seriously, NO KNEADING. The only hard part is that you have to prep the dough twelve to eighteen hours before you want to cook it. And by “prep,” I mean mix flour, salt, yeast, and water together in a bowl, cover it, and let it sit. Aside from having to plan ahead, this bread is impossible to mess up and the result is soft and crusty and delicious.

My favorite fall salad remains a favorite. I buy these sweet and spicy pecans from Trader Joe’s, rather than making my own. The dressing is delicious and easy to prepare in advance, and really the worst part of making the whole thing is chopping the shallot. 

To make things harder on myself, as is my tendency, I searched for fancy fall cocktails to make for our guests. I found an apple and gin autumn cocktail that sounded kind of weird but workable. Weird in the sense that I’ve never once thought that gin and apple cider would go together. However, I love gin, and I love apple cider, and I wanted a fall drink that didn’t require me to buy bourbon or a bunch of other liquors/liqueurs that I don’t normally use. So I tried it. And it was DELCIOUS. It’s lightly apple-y and not too sweet and goes down very easy. 

Why are all these hot dogs rolling their eyes at me?

The kids seemed to find the mummy hot dogs really charming, and making them was a fun project that Carla and I did together. Carla even ate half of her mummy, which was surprising. I am now realizing that I didn’t cut her hot dog for her, which probably made it hard for her to eat. Whoops. (Although it’s equally possible she just ate her weight in candy and had no room for hotdog, a food she is lukewarm on anyway.) (By the way, per the recipe, I did end up “gluing” candy eyes, leftover from the monster cookies, to the mummy dogs with ketchup, despite the whole thing making me very nauseated. I mean, ketchup with hot dogs?!?! Ew. Plus, candy eyeballs with hotdogs?!?!?!?! DOUBLE ew. But the kids did not care.)

My husband describes the flavor of these cookies as “overwhelmingly sweet.”

I think the biggest disappointment of the evening was the monster cookies. Well, and I would rate them only HALF a disappointment, because a) they were very fun to make together with Carla and b) they were really cute. But they were not the most delicious cookies I’ve ever had. They mainly tasted like white cake mix, to me. (Which is because they are made with a box of white cake mix.) But the kids liked them, so I think overall they were worth trying. Plus, now we have a million candy eyeballs.

This was very likely the last entertaining of any sort we will do for the season, so I am really glad it went so well. We only needed to turn on our heater and put on winter coats once the sun went down behind our neighbors’ houses, no one froze to death, everyone had a good time, mud washes off, and the kids did not seem to miss trick-or-treating at all. 

I didn’t look to see whether there were a lot of trick-or-treaters on our street. My husband did remark that he saw a big group of kids and adults, and none of them were wearing masks, but that was it. After our friends left, and we’d washed the dishes and put the covers back on the deck furniture, I watched Interview with the Vampire on Hulu and then went to bed. 

Now I need to get up the energy to put away the Halloween decorations. And start thinking about Christmas, I guess. 

Read Full Post »

Party Planning Committee Postmortem: How the Dinner Party Went

Let us rejoice! The dinner party is over!

I think it went well! People stayed until nearly ten, so that’s a good sign, right?

The biggest success of the night was using Meaghan’s GENIUS idea to put a plastic tablecloth down for the kids and then just scoop it up and throw it away once the kids were done.

Unfortunately, I did not have a real cloth tablecloth long enough for the table-with-leaf. But that’s okay. We put down placemats instead. And I forgot to put the flower arrangements back on the table after we turned it. But OH WELL I think it was still okay.

The biggest flop of the night was the kids’ sandwiches. I think the ham and cheese sandwiches went over slightly better than the BLTs, but even my bacon-loving child refused to eat the bacon.

I don’t know why! It was good! It seemed like maybe three of the seven children ate ANYTHING. My child – for whom, you will remember, I made the sandwiches in the first place – ate only fruit. But what the sandwiches lacked in appealingness-to-small-children, they made up for in adorability. Also I will never make them again because it does not take a small amount of time to cut out a million circles of bread and lettuce.

 

Let’s talk about the grown-up food.

It was a good idea to do a signature cocktail, I think. We made Dark and Stormies. Rather, my husband made them for people, and those who had one enjoyed it. (I had a gin gimlet.) We also had plenty of beer and wine.

We had a TON of appetizers. The hummus – from Costco – was barely touched, despite (or maybe because of?) the lovely paprika-oil I sprinkled on top of it per Lauren (I think I could have been more artful in my drizzling; next time) (my husband says the hummus was just Not Good). Barely anyone ate any of the veggies (which I bought and cut myself, except for the carrots; there were NO VEGGIES TRAYS to be found during any of my three trips to the grocery store!). Several people seemed to enjoy the cranberry relish (I sure did) and one of the guests brought chips and salsa, but we didn’t put much of a dent in that either. Basically, the appetizers weren’t a huge hit, I guess. Oh well. We had a whole bowl of cranberry relish to ourselves the next day, which isn’t a bad thing.

I know this combination of ingredients sounds weird, but it is SO GOOD.

The problem with having a secret blog is that it’s a little weird to take out your phone and get pictures of all the food before you serve it. Also, I wanted to get things on the table. So I have Before Pictures, but only one After Picture (courtesy of my husband).

My main panic of the evening was timing. (This is always my main panic. When do you start cooking something? When do you take it out? How forcefully do you push people to sit down? When do you clear the table? When do you serve dessert?) Everyone arrived about thirty minutes late. Which… fine. We all have small kids, things happen, not a big deal. (Except that in my plan, people arrived at one time, the kids would eat 30 minutes later, then the adults would eat 30 minutes after that. HA.) Of course, then the kids wanted to play, so they were really hard to wrangle for dinner. And then they kept slipping away from the table instead of eating their adorable but unappetizing sandwiches. Sigh. I have no idea what time we finally got them out of the kitchen and flipped the table, but by then the chicken was WAY overcooked.

Not cooked at all yet… So much potential for nice, juicy meat… 

I ate it – even though I am still Avoiding Chicken – and it had a good flavor. It was dry though. I put it in the oven a bit early because my oven tends to take a little longer than recipes say it should… but that extra time plus the tardiness of the guests plus the herding-cats of children issue led to dry chicken. I wish I had thought to pour the pan juices into pitchers so people could use it as gravy. But I didn’t. OH WELL.

The potato salad was dry, too, which was hugely disappointing. I guess my potatoes weren’t cut into small enough pieces? It didn’t prevent people from eating it, at least. I am a little fearful that our guests (especially the four who’ve never been to our house before) might think that I am A Cooker of Dry Food, but… what can you do. It is how it is.

The salad was very good and got compliments. I did not take a picture of it because I assembled it right before serving.

Carla had asked me to make a treasure hunt, so I did. That’s what the kids did while we were eating dinner. They had a BLAST, with only a couple of argumentative incidents. (Future Me: Do NOT tell Carla about the treasure hunt until it is time to BEGIN the treasure hunt or she will tell the other children and they will sneak around trying to find the clues without context and mess things up.) The actual treasure was: 1. Little rabbits that you put in water and “grow” from the dollar section at Target. 2. A washable Melissa & Doug tattoo. 3. Two mini Hershey’s kisses. 4. A fruit snack.

The kids — ages 3 to 7 — really enjoyed this treasure hunt. And they did a great job of working together to figure out the clues. I made them go up and down as many flights of stairs as possible in hopes of wearing them out. I hope they slept well for their parents.

The fallen chocolate cake was the best part of the dinner. (It wasn’t terrible to cook, either, although I had an Egg Incident that necessitated me buying another dozen eggs and tossing eight perfectly good eggs that I’d screwed up during the separation process.) It fluffed up just as it was supposed to, and fell while it cooled just as promised.

My husband made whipped cream and I piped it into the middle of the cake and topped it with raspberries. It was delicious. Moist and chocolatey with a nice crunch to the outer crust. The whipped cream and raspberries were the perfect complements.

At least SOME cake was left to photograph.

I had to double the recipe to make enough for a ten-inch springform pan, and I made cupcakes for the kiddos with the leftover batter. The cupcakes turned out a little weird: the bottoms somehow evaporated, so that when you took the wrapper off, there was only the top half of a cupcake inside. Oh well. The kids enjoyed them anyway. I put a blop of whipped cream and a raspberry on each one. Absolutely the only issue with the cake was that I was afraid to “frost” it before the guests arrived; it was a good thing, too, because the whipped cream fell and we had to re-whip it. But piping it and topping it with raspberries was a little stressful. Overall, WORTH IT.

I did not get a photo of them with their whipped-cream-and-raspberry toppers before the children descended upon them like locusts.

Next time, I might do the following things differently:

1. Have fewer guests. (Although, really, it worked out FINE.)
2. Find something (the only option is tacos) that Carla will eat that I can also make and serve to company. Or maybe pasta (as long as I save plain noodles for her)?
3. Fewer appetizers????

For future entertaining, I would definitely repeat:

1. The plastic tablecloth over a real tablecloth option for big groups/two seatings.
2. The treasure hunt (but a SECRET treasure hunt, next time).
3. Signature drinks.
4. The cake.

That’s that, Party Planning Committee! Thank you for your service and for attending this postmortem. Next time, we’ll do even better!

Read Full Post »

There Are Two Kinds of People, Appetizers Edition

Because I firmly believe that my mother and I cannot possibly be the only two people in the world who are the way we are, I am going to make a Vast Generalization about appetizer serving.

There are two kinds of people: The people who put out the entire bag of chips, and the people who put out half of the bag and then refill as necessary.

The people who put out the whole wedge of cheese, and the people who cut a wedge of Brie in half, and put out half and put the other half in the fridge.

The people who put out the whole jar of salsa, and the people who scoop half the jar of salsa into a smaller dish and put the rest in the fridge, adding more salsa from the fridge as the dish gets low.

And on and on.

The reason I am a Refill Person is twofold:

1.) I am germ-averse, and so I don’t like the idea of saving something that other people have been nibbling on. If it’s chips, I don’t want to re-bag a bunch of chips that people’s hands have been in contact with. If it’s dip, I don’t want to put away and then eat something that other people have been dipping (and possibly double-dipping) into.

2.) I don’t want to waste food. If I put the whole container of hummus out on the table and people nibble at it for a couple of hours, I am not going to want to put the rest of it back in the fridge for future consumption. First of all, see item 1 in this list. Secondly, it’s been out in the air, gathering bacteria and getting warm. Yuck. Extra yuck if it’s a mayonnaise/cream based dip. Or guacamole. Or cheese. If I put out only part of what I have to offer, I can always add more without the risk of having to throw away a large portion.

I acknowledge that there’s a disadvantage to being a Refill Person, which is that you need to be constantly vigilant that the chip bowl isn’t getting too empty. And you have to be keenly aware of the Eating Enthusiasm level of your guests – if it’s waning, you either let the bowl empty out, or you only put in a handful of new chips. If it’s still high, you can fill the bowl up to the tippety top again.

Okay, there’s a second disadvantage. In addition to the vigilance, you might end up spending a decent amount of time going back and forth to the kitchen/fridge to refill, which detracts not only from conversation with your guests (potentially a plus, I suppose, depending on the type of people you are entertaining) but (more importantly) from your own snacking.

Read Full Post »