Appetizers:

• Tomato, Onion and Goat Cheese Puff Pastry Tarts
• Blue Cheese Crackers served with fig jam and pear slices

Click here for the recipe for the puff pastry tarts, adapted from Ina Garten.  This is a very Barefoot Contessa-heavy menu because her recipes are just soooo good and I can’t help it.

Instead of the large puff pastry rounds she recommends, I cut smaller squares from the rolled-out puff pastry and tucked them into muffin pan cups that I had sprayed with nonstick cooking spray. I pricked the bottom of the puff pastry with a fork so it wouldn’t rise, and then layered the onions, tomato and cheeses according to the recipe.

• 1/4 pound (1 stick) unsalted butter at room temperature – make sure the butter is very soft.  Microwave for five seconds if you have to.
• 8 ounces Stilton cheese, crumbled (about 12 ounces with rind), at room temperature
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1 extra-large egg beaten with 1 tablespoon water for egg wash
• 3/4 cup finely chopped walnuts

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By Jason Merritt, Getty Images

So it was a fun time.

By the way, I love love love the Fug Girls for the red carpet rundown. Check them out, if you haven’t already.

Anyway, back to the shindig: I made two kinds of tea sandwiches, lemon cookies, my skinny margaritas and a grapefruit champagne cocktail that knocked me on the floor because it was SO tasty that I couldn’t stop myself. So tasty that I forgot to take a photo of it, even as I announced to everyone in earshot how good it was and how it was definitely going on BB&B in the morning. So tasty that I didn’t wake up in time to write this post before morning class and am now posting it well into the afternoon and frankly Ithinkwe’veallbeentheresothere. OKAY?

Raspberries on lemon cookies

The spread

Please continue for the recipes . . .

Cucumber Tea Sandwiches

• white bread (I used wheat, but I think it would be better with white)
• seedless cucumber
• cream cheese/Tofutti
• salt

Cover bread with cream cheese (or Tofutti, which I used for a vegan friend and it actually tasted really good and was far fewer calories, so I am now a Tofutti fan). Peel a seedless cucumber, cut very thin slices, and place on the cream cheese-covered bread. Sprinkle salt over the cucumbers. Put the top piece of bread on and cut crusts off.

Apple and Boursin Open-Faced Tea Sandwiches

• oat bread
• Boursin cheese
• apples
• curry powder

Cover bread with Boursin cheese. Cut thin slices of apple, of whatever kind you like: I used Red Delicious, but green apples would be tasty also if you like a more tart flavor. Place on bread and sprinkle a tiny bit of curry powder over the apples.

It’s helpful for spreading to have the cheese at room temperature and the bread a little frozen. I popped it in the freezer for about half an hour before starting. I cut the open-faced apple sandwich into triangles, and the cucumber sandwiches into rectangles. It’s also fun to use cookie cutters to cut them into shapes.

Grapefruit Champagne Cocktail

• champagne/sparkling wine
• grapefruit juice
• Grand Marnier

Pour a glass of champagne or sparkling wine 3/4 full. Pour in grapefruit juice until the glass is almost full, and top with a splash of Grand Marnier. Enjoy attempting to exercise more self-control than I did.

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Photo by Appleswitch/Flickrcc

Putting toppings on potato chips and serving them to your dinner party guests as an appetizer is such a gorgeous idea! Simple in conception, as time-intensive as you feel like making it, and totally yummy. Either place an alloted amount on each chip for a more formal dinner party, or let your guests dip them themselves if you are creating a casual atmosphere.

From The Atlantic’s Sally Schneider, “Dress Up Your Chips“:

Here are some of my recent potato chip improvisations:

• with Robiola, a soft, mild Italian cheese that tastes like slightly fermented cream (I learned this combo from my friend Peggy Markel on the island of Elba, who designs food and culture adventures in Italy, North Africa, and India

• with sour cream and just about any smoked fish, such as smoked salmon, trout, or sturgeon

• with crème fraiche and caviar (salmon or American sturgeon, for example)

• with eggs: richly scrambled with cream, soft-boiled or fried; or imagine a tiny fried quail egg on a single potato chip (what an hors d’oeuvre!); warm, smashed hard-boiled eggs mixed with mayo andPimenton de la Vera

• with warm brandade de morue (a salt cod, potato, and olive oil puree)

• with Skordalia, a creamy Greek garlic sauce

• with warmed, shredded, slow-cooked meat like short ribs, Seven-Hour Spoon Lamb, or pot roast with a dab of sour cream

• and of course, with Real Onion Dip.

Potato chips are also a perfect dessert with a sliver of fine chocolate sandwiched between them. I like them for afternoon tea. Or dip the chips in tempered chocolate and lay them on a rack or a piece of wax paper until the chocolate hardens.

The ultimate potato chip confection, however, I learned from a reader of my blog, whose mom used to make it for her private snack: a potato chip with a slab of ripe banana—like a crunchy, salty-sweet banana tart.

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I whipped this up for the Super Bowl and for the Opening Ceremonies, and it was a big hit – which is saying something when it’s competing with nachos, cake, brownies, chips, etc.

Dill, Sour Cream and Onion Vegetable Dip
Adapted from Recipezaar

Don’t forget vegetables for dipping – baby carrots, broccoli florets, red and yellow peppers, snow peas, or cucumbers are all great choices.

• one 16 ounce container of sour cream (I used full fat, but feel free to try lower fat sour creams)
• 3/4 cup mayonnaise
• 1/3 of a sweet yellow onion, minced
• one small container of baby dill (about 1/4 cup before chopping)
• 1 1/2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon Vege-Sal

Mix the sour cream and mayonnaise together. Yes, I made this in a very unattractive plastic tupperware because I was bringing it over to my mom’s later for the Opening Ceremonies and didn’t want to dirty an extra dish. I’m practical like that.

Remove the dill leaves from the stalk.

Chop finely.

Chop the onion and add, along with the Worcestershire sauce and salts. Mix thoroughly and add seasonings to your taste.

Chop up whatever veggies you chose and dunk away!

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Seven Spoons

As much as her recipes sound tasty, and her photographs of food are tantalizing, it is Tara’s writing that I love to read whenever I visit her cooking blog, Seven Spoons. And you know how much I adore Christmastime, so this post about spiced popcorn in particular really got me.

A tree groaningly, gloriously laden with ornaments, most especially at the precise height of a three-year-old who is thisclose to turning four. A pair of slender glasses that chimed when clinked, filled with berry-hued bubbly drinks to be sipped over the quiet hours of mid night. That bite of shortbread cookie, swirled with raspberry jam and finely chopped almonds, buttery and tender and tart and perfect.

I think I’m going to make this popcorn as an easy-to-carry-on-the-subway appetizer for a dinner I’ve been invited to next weekend.

Check out her writing and recipes, you won’t be disappointed. http://sevenspoons.net/

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That said, I totally broke my own rule and made some fluffy, gorgeous biscuits.

I couldn’t help it: Smitten Kitchen put them up and they only have five ingredients! All of which were all in my kitchen! It’s my kryptonite. So easy to just throw together. Plus, a good friend was arriving from out of town tonight. PLUS, another friend was coming over for to kill some time before a date. The confluence of those events just can’t go by me without my offering some sort of homemade food!

So, I threw together the biscuits at lunchtime (using a wine glass to cut them, since I don’t have a biscuit cutter) and stuck them in the fridge so I could bake them ten minutes before everyone was supposed to arrive. I followed her recipe, so I won’t be redundant and repost it here – just click here to go to the recipe.

My dough made eight normal-sized biscuits and one baby biscuit.

I served them with an assortment of creamy butter, clotted cream, jams, honey and raspberries and oh my gosh, all of the toppings together was the best combination.

These biscuits are really tasty right out of the oven, but don’t keep very well. We made fried egg/cheddar cheese/turkey bacon breakfast sandwiches with them the next morning and they were too dry (but no matter: I just threw some extra ketchup on that bad boy and called it good!). However, they’re so easy to make ahead that they’re great for dinner parties. I would make them for an unusual dinner party appetizer with either honey butter or herb butter, or for a dinner party dessert with a fruit sauce and spiced whipped cream. So tasty.

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It was gorgeous and a wonderful evening. Alexis was down from Connecticut for the day and stopped by to stay hi while I was stringing the flowers for the ceiling. Of course I invited her to stay for dinner, and she was such a wonderful addition to our party – and got to hear lots of stories about Fairfield (where we all grew up) that either scared or intrigued her! Ha!

It’s an artistic group, so it was really fun to create a colorful table with bouquets of color pencils over brown craft paper that begged to be drawn on. I used it as the easiest place cards ever – just wrote everyone’s names above their plates.

The flowers were simple, but added a punch of color. I bought four bunches of carnations in yellow and three shades of pink, and kept each color in its own vase rather than mixing them. It made the flowers look cohesive and at the same time, with the colored pencils, made the table as a whole very colorful.

I then strung blossoms on three long strands of thread and hung them from the ceiling for something more festive and with a little bit of South Asian flair.

We made gorgeous doodles.

And the food…Anna brought her gorgeous macaroons made with organic sweetened condensed milk, but I was so consumed with eating them that I completely forgot to take a photograph. Just imagine perfectly browned, chewy golden macaroons, and you’ll have a good sense of how lovely they were. Please continue for the post-mortem on my dishes.

Everything turned out really well except for the haricots verts, which I didn’t cook quite long enough.

I prepped as much as I could earlier in the day. It took me about 2.5 hours to clean mushrooms and chop walnuts for the pasta, make the zucchini rollup appetizer, make the butternut squash soup, do the dishes and clean up the kitchen. I then mostly followed my plan for the evening, except that I totally forgot to take the soup out of the fridge on time. Instead, I remembered and started heating it at the same time I put the pasta in the oven. However, luckily, the soup heated very quickly and the pasta took longer than expected to bake, so it all worked out just fine and we did have dinner fairly on time – I think we started eating a little after 8, which to me is a win for my 7:45 goal!

Zucchini Rollups

I admit I was a bit worried these would be too boring to open the show with a bang, but they were fantastic. I liberally salt and peppered the zucchini and grilled it slowly on my stovetop grill pan, which gave it rich grill marks and the softness needed to roll them up. My one tip: make sure you cut the zucchini thinly enough to roll it!  My first two slices were far too thick and I didn’t realize it until it was too late.  But don’t worry – they made a nice addition to my lunch.

Curry Butternut Squash Soup

I don’t know if it was just the curry powder that I bought, but I put in the amount the recipe calls for and found it quite spicy. I am very sensitive to spice, though, so – of course AFTER I put it all in, I realized this! – I should have started with half the amount and then seasoned to taste. I also found the soup very bland based on the recipe, so I added salt, pepper, Vege-Sal, nutmeg and cinnamon to taste. I probably used a few teaspoons of salt, about a teaspoon of Vege-Sel, half a teaspoon of nutmeg, and a sprinkle of cinnamon. I loved it with the yogurt and, best of all, it looked beautiful as the first course.

Corn Pasta with Gorgonzola, Mushrooms and Walnuts, Haricots Verts

I cut the mushrooms and walnuts during my prep earlier in the day, and couldn’t find a safe place to put the walnuts where they wouldn’t be tipped over until I came up with the toaster oven! So of course I had to take a photo of my geniusness, haha. The grownup mac and cheese tasted tangy and creamy – and the mushrooms were goooorrrrgeous!

Unfortunately I didn’t roast the haricots verts long enough – I just pulled them out of the oven when I took the pasta dish out, and while the bean I tried tasted nicely al dente, overall they were still too crunchy. I’m going to work on my recipe and I’ll post it when it actually results in haricots verts that taste the way I want them to.

It was a wonderful evening – thank you for coming, everyone!

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