Last night, friends and family got together to help my partner
organize his books -- we're talking a LOT of books. So I made
snackage for the book-organizing time, and a meal for the dinner break
(which ended up being several dinner breaks, because people came along
in several shifts, so I'm glad I made stuff that keeps warm well.
The snackage:
* small sweet peppers -- half stuffed with a mixture of cream cheese,
black olives, and pimento-stuffed green olives, and half with a
mixture of cream cheese and some marvelous marinated tomatoes from our
local Italian deli
* trail mix
* florentine cookies (someone else also brought chocolate-chip cookies
and kumquats from her tree)
* hot artichoke dip. I made it from a double batch of Charlotte's
recipe, using marinated artichokes, and added toasted pinenuts on top.
Everyone LOVED it except for me. I found it too lemony, but not bad.
* pita chips, garlic toasts, and crackers for the dip
Dinner:
* Clam chowder (saute two chopped onions and six or eight small red
unpeeled chopped potatoes in a stick of butter, with some salt and
pepper. Add a large can of clams (the kind of can you get at Costco
-- probably about a quart), a small bottle of clam juice, half a
gallon of whole milk (we used lactose-free). Bring to just under a
boil and cook until the potatoes are soft (I know some people don't
want to cook the clams that long, but it's how my mom taught me). When
ready to serve, thicken with another bottle of clam juice mixed with a
bunch of cornstarch) and oyster crackers
* Country-style pork ribs (seven and a half pounds of them)
slow-cooked for an hour on high and six on low with two onions, two
apples, and a mess of sauerkraut. James had four bowls, and everyone
else liked it a lot, too, even Guy, who doesn't like sauerkraut (or
any pickled food) at all.
* The caramelized-onion-spinach-feta-marinated-tomatoes quiche I made
the other week and posted about (I made two)
* Roasted asparagus (roasted with olive oil and salt while the quiche
was baking)
Usually, at least one thing I make comes out weird or wrong, but
everything went really well last night, and I ended up with some
leftovers, but not an unmanageable amount. (There were eleven people
total, I think.)
serene