It's been quite a while since I've posted. I'm sorry for neglecting you, blog. School ended but then I was surprisingly busy seeing friends and whatnot, and then moving out of my college house and back to my hometown. Anyway, that's still no excuse. I was still cooking, just not as much. And I forgot to take pictures of stuff. But I digress.
I did a small dinner party with my sister yesterday, and due to a questionable series of events I ended up being basically in charge of all the food. This meant that I planned the menu and cooked it all, but with a lot of help from a few other people in the kitchen (although, on a side note, I never realized how difficult it is to assign jobs to other people while cooking- I had to have all the recipes in my head at once and think about what the prep and next step was for each one at the same time. More confusing than it seems. Or maybe just for me. Either way, the end result was that I frequently ended up standing in the middle of the kitchen with a blank expression on my face, trying to remember what was in the oven or how long onions had been cooking.) I obviously cooked all vegetarian, but since a lot of the people in attendance were omnivores I tried to make sure that I didn't make anything which was too crazy-hippie-vegan which would scare them away.
After some musings about what to make (heh, pun totally intended as a joke between me and my blog name.... I'm really cool like that) the menu I ended up with was:
My caramelized pears and onions on lentil cakes with vinaigrette salad as an appetizer, slightly tweaked to use the ingredients on hand at my sister's house- it was a balsamic vinaigrette instead of raspberry, and there were walnuts instead of pecans.
The main course was broccoli stuffed shells, loosely based off of this recipe but also just kind of thrown together, but with homemade sauce (which I just learned how to make.... I always thought it was super difficult to make homemade sauce so I always used the stuff from the jar, but it was so easy and so delicious! Once I attempt it without supervision I'll have to post it here.).
For side dishes we had roasted vegetables (cauliflower, green beans, and carrots) and garlic knots. However, as usual when I cook with yeast, I had some technical difficulties. The first batch of dough (so yes, this means I had to make another batch later) I made did not rise at all. I'm sad to say that I used my recipe for garlic knots, and it just didn't work, unless you like very condensed and chewy knots. I'm convinced the yeast were on strike. Instead of going out and buying dough at this point, though, I made another batch. I'm stubborn like that. I used Joy the Baker's recipe for whole wheat garlic knots, although I just used her directions for the dough and didn't make my knots the way she did. Thankfully this time the yeast did their bubbling-and-rising thing and didn't make me look like a garlicky failure. The knots actually rose a ton and were way larger than I usually make them. (sorry, I forgot to take pictures. I was frazzled.) My problem with these is that they were too bready and not as dense as I like garlic knots, so I guess my search for the perfect garlic knot continues. One day I'll just have to make a bunch of batches with different amounts of stuff until I get a good balance. One day.
Finally, dessert was chocolate peanut butter brownies from Evil Shenanigans with homemade chocolate peanut butter sauce (peanut butter, melted chocolate, corn syrup, and milk) with vanilla ice cream. The brownies were dense and a little sticky, but worked perfectly in a brownie sundae.
I had never done any cooking (at least where I was in charge) for more than about 3 people, and the end result was that I made enough food for about double the amount that I needed. But I guess it's better to have too much than too little, right? And leftovers are awesome. Anyway, end of the story is dinner party success. Next time maybe I'll even remember to take pictures.
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