The Rest of the Ratatouille Party

I figure I should finish up talking about my little dinner party since it was nearly a week ago. So, here goes. To start with I offered my guests whole-wheat mini pitas with home-made tzatziki.

I loosely followed this Epicurious recipe for tzatziki, the yogurt based dip and sauce. The major differences between mine and the recipe were that I used 2 cups of 3% Balkan-style yogurt, no olive oil, and probably less than a pound of cucumber. I think it was decent with the pitas and for dunking the main course in. Then again, I really like yogurt.

I also served a green salad from the garden dressed simply in red wine vinegar, olive oil and black pepper. Possibly I liked that better than anyone else. Greens that good may be an acquired taste, because well they taste. Travis was talking about that at the garden the other day. Some are bitter or spicy or they just have a lettuce flavour that supermarket greens don't have.

Finally, for the main course (along with ratataouille of course) I served "grilled" souvlaki-style chicken and pork skewers and "grilled" mushroom and onion skewers. They are "grilled" because I only have a George Foreman Grill. It's so not the same, but it had to do.

I marinated pieces of chicken thigh and pork loin in a mixture of lemon juice and zest, olive oil, black pepper, red pepper flakes, garlic, rosemary, thyme, oregano, and salt. I used a similar marinade for mushrooms and onions. The marinating lasted about 4 hours. After that, I put the meat and veggies on separate skewers and "grilled" them until cooked.

The chicken was especially good, but you were probably expecting me to say it was the pork. But, chicken thigh has a delicious juiciness from a bit of fat. It was superb. The meat comes out a little tart, a bit spicy, and fragrant from the herbs. Marinated kababs are a very good idea for imparting flavour to meat and you could vary it to your own taste. I also liked the grilled mushrooms and onions. The onions get quite sweet. I guess I'm an onion-lover, maybe now I'll have trouble finding a human-lover, hehe. Anyways, I made one big mistake by letting meat juices get on the mushrooms and onions and making them unappetizing for the vegetarian who eats fish I intended them for. Big oops, I felt pretty bad.

Here's a pick of the food I just described as leftovers the next day:
Finally, there was dessert. I made something quite similar to Clotilde Dusoulier's recipe for Creme De Ricotta A La Mangue, Croustillant De Macadamia (aka: Creamy Mango Ricotta with Macadamia Crunch)from the Chocolate and Zucchini book. The one key difference between my dessert and the recipe is that I left our the nuts due to one guest's nut allergy, but she didn't stay to try dessert. So, mine was more "Creamy Mango Ricotta with Maple-Oatmeal Crunch". It was good anyways. Besides, nuts get caught in my throat all the time. Here's a picture of it:
And a close up of the "crunch":
There are essentially three components: the crunch, the cream, and the fruit. I made all in somewhat increased quantity for six dessert portions. The crunch was oatmeal tossed with melted butter, real maple syrup, and lime zest then toasted in the oven. The cream was a half-kilo of ricotta cheese mixed with some half and half, icing sugar, and a touch of vanilla. The vanilla was my idea. Finally, the fruit in the bottom layer was simply chopped mango tossed with a little lime juice.

I really enjoyed the dessert. The oatmeal topping was crisp and sweet. I had leftovers of it and they were delicious, essentially homemade granola. It was a pleasing contrast to the rich, creamy ricotta layer, which was not overly sweet and slightly grainy with the ricotta texture. The mango was sweet and fragrant. It's still one of my favourite fruits.

Anyways, at the party two people left before dessert. I'm not sure what they were thinking. That left me with two superfluous desserts. I ate one at the party in a fit of piggishness that left me slightly over-stuffed. Then, I ate the other one the next day. All three that I ate were excellent, although they are probably best eaten one at a time.

All in all, the dinner party was pretty successful. The Chocolate and Zucchini recipes for dessert and ratatouille were highlights, although I think I mix up a damn fine chicken marinade.

Ratatouille: Au Four and the Movie

Ladies and gentlemen, I have become obsessed with Ratatouille. I decided to host a small dinner party on Saturday with hopes of going to see Ratatouille after because I heard it was a good food movie. The dinner party part went off fine and I had five friends over for a meal that I will probably describe over several posts. The revelatory dish that I made was incidentally ratatouille. It's the dish I felt was "must make" to fit my theme, not to mention I was curious about it. Here's my ratatouille from that night:

Actually, that's leftover ratatouille because I forgot to take any photos that night. It's freaking good leftover anyways. I used Clotilde Dusoulier's recipe for Ratatouille Au Four in the "Chocolate and Zucchini" book, because well I wanted to use her recipe since it worked so well for her. There's a recipe here on her blog, but it's not quite like the book one. The recipe in the book is. . . larger, even as I made it with only 5 or 6 tomatoes and two zucchini. Actually, it's really large and i couldn't fit it in my largest mixing bowl to mix or in a single baking dish. It's a variation on traditional ratatouille because it's oven roasted.

I didn't get a lot of browning on the vegetables for the dinner party, but the results were. . . amazing. I absolutely loved it and my guests enjoyed it too. It produced plenty of sweet, intensely flavoured veggie juices. The onion became very sweet, the yellow and red bell pepper strips were really sweet and tasty as well. I liked the tomato, zucchini and eggplant pieces as well. There were fabulous contrasts in texture and flavour in the large vegetable chunks. They retained a lot of character of the individual vegetables while being enhanced by the "sauce" of veggie juices, herbs, salt, pepper, and olive oil. I suppose it could have been better if I used fresh rather than dried thyme. I highly recommend this recipe, though. It's tasty and easy.

Unfortunately seeing Ratatouille didn't' work out in conjunction with the dinner since dinner went to long and some people had to leave early. But, I did have a special "chef experience." I got a minor burn extracting the ratatouille from my oven. I know you want to see it:

You mean you didn't want to see that? Well, it's my blog and I feel I have a public responsibility to warn people not to touch the inside of a hot oven's door like I did.

After my dinner party was over I still wanted to see Ratatouille. So, I went downtown on Sunday afternoon and watched it by myself like the pathetic, obsessed person I am. I really liked the movie, but not the loud children in the theatre. It's really unlike other children's movies. The plot is not really predictable and. . . I'm not a movie reviewer. It's a good movie to see if you like food and are fascinated by restaurant kitchens.

Looking at what what in my fridge in the aftermath of the dinner party, I was excited to find most of the ingredients for another ratatouille au four. I had a remaining zucchini, a tomato (not in the fridge of course), a green bell pepper, rosemary, onions, and garlic. Yesterday I bought a small eggplant and a second large tomato. Today I cut a medium to large zucchini from the garden. I combined all these ingredients into another, smaller ratatouille. This one was not quite so juicy. Perhaps this is due to there being fewer tomatoes or a bit less olive oil. The eggplant browned quite nicely, though. The batch was still enormous, requiring two baking dishes. Using green peppers made it perhaps slightly less colourful and sweet than with red and yellow peppers, but the green pepper adds a savoury complexity that the other peppers lack.

Anyways, here's a pick of my second batch of ratatouille this week:

You know it must be good if I made it that quickly again.

Dinner Party Part 3: Dessert (AKA: The Main Event)

If you've been reading my Blog--and I know you probably haven't--you would be able to figure out what I made for dessert for my dinner party. Want a hint? I ate three of them on Monday. It was brownies!!!

These are my dark chocolate brownies. They're mine because I sort of combine and modify two recipes, one from Epicurious and one from the BHG New Cookbook (not very gourmet, I know). Anyways, this is quite a chocolaty brownie with a crumbly texture and medium density (neither lead nor aluminum, hehe) I like them and my friends dug in at the party, so they must be alright. Brownies are super easy, everyone should make them. They will impress your friends with minimum effort.

Here's how I do it:

6 tablespoons butter (I use salted, I'm not a proper gourmet, but I don't add extra salt later)

4 ounces coarsely chopped unsweetened chocolate

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

2/3 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Melt butter and unsweetened chocolate over low heat, stir it a lot, use a saucepan. When it's all melted, remove it from the heat and cool it somewhat.

2. Grease a 9-inch square cake pan.

3. Stir the sugar into the chocolate and butter goodness in the pot. Add the eggs individually and stir well between each addition. Add vanilla, stir again.

4. Stir together the flour and baking powder with a fork. Add this to the chocolaty goodness. Stir until it's combined, do not over-stir. Put the batter in the pan, really that's the best place for it.

5. Bake for 23-25 minutes. Take it out, cool it, cut it into brownies. (I broke mine flipping it out of the pan. But rustic brownies are good, so it was fine.)

Here's a gratuitous shot of the unbroken brownies in the pan:

Somebody should try to lift it out and eat the whole thing. But, that would be piggish, but delicious. And it would break. . .

Dinner Party Part 2: Main Dishes

I did a really bad job of photographing the main dishes I made for my dinner party. So all you're going to see is the mango chutney above. It was served with an oven roasted pork tenderloin made using this recipe, with a few changes. The changes were that I used ground cumin and added it with the turmeric, I roasted the meat at 450 F to an internal tempertature of 155 F, and I omitted the cilantro because I don't really like it. This was the second time I made this reciped and it's good. Obviously that's why I made it again. The roasting probably took at least half an hour, but I wasn't timing it.

Anyways, the result was very good. Tender and lightly curry flavoured pork with a sweet, tart, and spicy chutney. I don't know about its authenticity as Indian food, but my Indian friend thought it was good and not totally Western. Anyways, the recipe tastes good and the chutney can be conveniently made in advance and served at room temperature.

In addition to the pork, I made shrimp. I like having pork with seafood. It just seems right, I think I've mentioned this before. Anyways, I used a pound of large shrimp to make "Border-Style Shrimp." I reduced the recipe to about 2/3 of the original amounts, but used all the spices. I also used a little olive oil instead of cooking spray as I don't own any and it's not my style. Anyways, I was too busy eating the shrimp and making the pork to photograph them. But they were good, a little tart from the lime, a touch of spice, and some buttery goodness. They were really fast and easy too, but I think shrimp sautees generally are. One could definitely do worse. Then again, I find shrimp intrinsically delicious and tastier than lobster. Lobster provides for my exciting eating though, what with all the shell cracking and digging for meat.

Dinner Party Part 1: Appetizers

On Saturday I hosted my first ever dinner party. I think it was tasty and fun for me and four of my friends who decided to attend. First up were the appetizers: I made two different toppings for baguette slices: a "classic caponata" and garlicky roasted bell peppers with feta cheese. Interestingly rumor has it one of my guests would eat an entire baguette with spinach dip given the opportunity.

First up, the peppers. This is my variation on a recipe that my uncle learned from a Greek neighbour. My uncle and father make this by barbecuing the peppers to blacken them. I'm not equipped for that, so I use my oven following the guidelines of Clotilde. Bell peppers take nearly an hour to roast at 400 degrees, with several turns. I used two green peppers and one red, since I wanted a mix of colours and flavours. After sweating the peppers in foil and peeling them, I sliced them into strips and tossed them with about two tablespoons of olive oil, a minced clove of garlic, salt, and pepper. I then refrigerated them overnight as these things get better with time. It's key to roast the peppers on foil as pepper juices can burn and pretty much ruin a baking tray. I know because it happened to me a few months ago. These are my peppers after roasting and sweating, don't be alarmed at the burnt spots because they peel off for the most part when you skin the peppers by hand.

I really like the taste of the peppers combined with feta cheese slices and bread. I've eaten that combo four separate times in the last two days because I had leftovers since three peppers is more than five people need. Every bite is good with it's combination of salt, creaminess, breadiness (bread is good, don't you know?), and the indescribable but so good flavour of roasted pepper. As a variation, you could use hot peppers like my uncle does. In this case, the feta is a necessary cooling agent. Even so, three years ago I could barely eat one piece of his roasted chili. It was freaking hot.

I made the caponata from this recipe on Epicurious. I'd never had caponata that I know of, but it sounded good and I like eggplant. Plus, the recipe was well rated. I made a bit less than the full recipe, which was nevertheless a lot. I used a one pound eggplant, 3/4 of an onion, two tablespoons of red wine vinegar, and a little less than the recommended amount of olive oil. I omitted the pine nuts since one of my guests was probably allergic, plus I'm lazy and cheap (actually I'm not sure if they're expensive). Also, I boiled the mixture considerably longer than recommended. I think this helped the flavours to meld together and to soften the eggplant. Here you can see the onions, garlic, and eggplant sauteing. It looks pretty good right there.

This was a good make-ahead appetizer. My guests seemed to like combining it with feta cheese as well, which is fine by me. I'm really not a food Nazi who tells people exactly how to eat my cooking. I actually just want people to enjoy what I make for them. The flavour of the caponata is a bit tart with plenty of eggplant texture. The capers in it add a tart and salty dimension. If you haven't tried capers, you really should. I'm experimenting with mixing the leftovers with pasta for lunch tomorrow.

In conclusion, tasty things on bread are a winner as starters for a dinner party. Plus, they can be made the day before and I'm pretty sure my friends liked them nearly as much as I did.