Friday, April 15, 2005
April Blogger Dinner Recap
by Tom Bozzo
Since I spent most of the gathering hour cooking, I get to point to someone else's pictures for a change, here at Ocean. (Would I throw the pie? A thousand times no, and certainly not at Nina.) Jeremy also notes a couple of conversational highlights, and says some nice things about the food, too. Thanks! It was great to have everyone over!
As for dinner, here's the menu.
Stravecchio Gougères. We modified this recipe from Emerils.com to use native cheese; I understand the Silver Palate cookbook's version is substantially the same. This was perhaps the one miscalculation, as they came out of the oven a little to far in advance of the guests' arrival. On the plus side, the excess reheated farily well this morning.
Chicken roulades with spinach, blue cheese (from Dane County Farmers' Market veterans Hook's), and walnut filling; basmati rice; roasted asparagus. The main dish is the second recipe I've had from Charlie Trotter Cooks at Home. This one wasn't difficult, but was maybe a little too labor-intensive for everyday. A more ferocious mallet for flattening the meat would have helped quite a bit. It was delightful in any event.
It makes me wish that Condoleezza Rice would promptly sign an oath that she wasn't going to run for President in 2008 (not obvious why she'd want to scrap with the likes of Newt and Bill "send me your feral cats" Frist), so Nina and I could close out the relevant portion of our wager and start looking for a suitable pretext for trying Charlie Trotter Cooks at Charlie Trotter's.
Apple pie with spiced crust. The crust is the slightly sweet butter-and-lard crust (with vegetable shortening filling in for the lard) from Pie Every Day, plus a spice mix from a spiced crust recipe elsewhere in the same book. The latter made a very hard-to-work dough, so I was looking for the flavor without the hassle.
Last night, Suzanne and I hosted the April dinner with friends who sometimes blog. This time, we had B, C, F, and O, plus my dad who was visiting.
Since I spent most of the gathering hour cooking, I get to point to someone else's pictures for a change, here at Ocean. (Would I throw the pie? A thousand times no, and certainly not at Nina.) Jeremy also notes a couple of conversational highlights, and says some nice things about the food, too. Thanks! It was great to have everyone over!
As for dinner, here's the menu.
Stravecchio Gougères. We modified this recipe from Emerils.com to use native cheese; I understand the Silver Palate cookbook's version is substantially the same. This was perhaps the one miscalculation, as they came out of the oven a little to far in advance of the guests' arrival. On the plus side, the excess reheated farily well this morning.
Chicken roulades with spinach, blue cheese (from Dane County Farmers' Market veterans Hook's), and walnut filling; basmati rice; roasted asparagus. The main dish is the second recipe I've had from Charlie Trotter Cooks at Home. This one wasn't difficult, but was maybe a little too labor-intensive for everyday. A more ferocious mallet for flattening the meat would have helped quite a bit. It was delightful in any event.
It makes me wish that Condoleezza Rice would promptly sign an oath that she wasn't going to run for President in 2008 (not obvious why she'd want to scrap with the likes of Newt and Bill "send me your feral cats" Frist), so Nina and I could close out the relevant portion of our wager and start looking for a suitable pretext for trying Charlie Trotter Cooks at Charlie Trotter's.
Apple pie with spiced crust. The crust is the slightly sweet butter-and-lard crust (with vegetable shortening filling in for the lard) from Pie Every Day, plus a spice mix from a spiced crust recipe elsewhere in the same book. The latter made a very hard-to-work dough, so I was looking for the flavor without the hassle.
