Holiday (or Birthday) Party Food – Appetizers

Holidays season means… party time, and if you’re lucky, then it’s parties. Here are a few ideas to make your party stress free.
What you see in the pictures is what I served for my birthday party in August. That was outside in the backyard… But, regardless of the weather, all the ingredients I used then are available year round. This menu was easy to make, quick, and offered different types of food to serve every guest’s taste.

First, a nice platter of cheeses with seasonal fruits and nuts is classic, as it is elegant and casual at the same time. Served with different types of crackers it is loved by most people.


For the cheese platter:
Start with a nice platter, of course
Buy different kinds of cheese: yellow, white, blue, soft, hard, cubes, log, rounds, simple, sophisticated, etc
Add seasonal fruits and toasted nuts
Decorate with fresh herbs or edible flowers. Mint is a beautiful herb and always available, and you can also use it to make Warm Winter Herbal Tea, which I’m sure your guests will appreciate in this weather.
Accompany the cheese platter with some nice olives and more crackers with sesame, poppy, spices, etc, or small slices of bread.

Next, open-faced sandwich/crostini/bruschetta/tartine/whatever you want to name it, is a perfect finger food for a cocktail party, or any party.
The idea it to take bread and slice it thinly, then toast or grill it, usually brushed with olive oil, or butter. If you are short on time and your bread is fresh, just serve it as is without toasting.
Slice a baguette crosswise on a bias. Brush slices with olive oil or spread some butter, if you want. Toast it in a 350 F oven or grill it if you dare go outside in this weather (see Grilling in the Rain), until it is crispy or lightly browned (but not totally dry and don’t burn it like my husband did.) I prepared two kinds:

Eggplant Crostini – with eggplant marinated in herbs (recipe here), with feta/goat cheese, cherry tomatoes, and basil on top.

Blue cheese, walnuts and honey Crostini – spread the bread with fig jam and top with crumbled blue cheese, toasted and chopped nuts (smoosh/press those firmly onto the bread with your hands),and a drizzle of honey (add the honey just before serving, if you can. If not ,don’t worry about it and do it ahead.)

For the guests who like simple or more familiar food, I served Guacamole and corn chips and Hummus with sliced veggies, like cucumber, peppers, with pita triangles (warm those in the oven).
I also served assorted nuts and more types of crackers, fruit and vegetables.

As for drinks, those depend on your crowd, do they like a nice wine, a cocktail, hot coffee, tea or spiced cider?

For additional ideas, visit my World Flavor web site and check out the “What’s cooking?” page for more menus I have catered to different parties and events.

Have a great party!
Nurit

More holiday food ideas:

Easy dinner party - Work & Cook: How to cook a dinner party for 6+5+2 on a conference day?
Season flavors - Thanksgiving-y Chicken Dinner

Enjoy Your Fat

“Enjoy your fat” and “Enjoy your meat on the bone” are the dedications Jennifer McLagan wrote for me in my copies of her cookbooks “Fat” and “Bones. And I say “Halleluyah” and of course I am also Very Happy about my two new cookbooks. However, I do need to buy a new bookcase. And by the way, this weekend’s cake is being baked in the oven right now. It is Apple, Cinnamon and Walnuts Cake from “The Book of New Israeli Food” and the aroma is driving me crazy. Oh, boy. And now back to “Fat”.

Photo copied from Kim Ricketts Book Events web site

So last night, at a beautiful loft on Capitol Hill, at a books event, we saw and heard Jennifer McLagan. Jennifer is a chef/food writer and the author of the James Beard award winning book, Bones, who came to town to share with us her new book, Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes. This awesome event was a collaboration of Kim Ricketts Book Events, Michael Hebb from One Pot, and Caffe Vita. We had a lot of fun and I can’t wait until they do their next books event. I highly recommend that you participate in it too.

With all the wine we drank, the dim lights, and the background music I’m not sure I captured all the right details, so I do apologize in advance for any error I make. And do correct me if you were there in a more clear-headed condition and know better.

We sat next to Tess and Ryan and across from Nicky and Chad. Tess, as it turned out, reads my blog and even cooked some of the recipes. That was a very cool experience for me as this was the first time I met someone who reads my blog who, until yesterday, was a complete stranger (unlike relatives, friends, or parents from my kids schools who read my blog). We had a great time talking with them about food, wine, and all kinds of other good stuff.

For dinner, we had:
Duck Rillettes (juicy shreds of meat held together by fat)
Dandelion Salad with Hot Bacon Dressing
Roasted Marrow Bones
and, Cassoulet

Not need to say it was heavenly.

For dessert we had amazing, and I can’t stress the word “amazing” enough to describe the wonderful Chocolate Truffles from Theo chocolate, made by Chad. The flavors: ginger, burnt sugar, and figs and fennel. Divine. I can’t choose which one was my favorite. I liked them all. A lot.
To end the meal, we had freshly brewed coffee by Caffé Vita.

What can I say? You want to be there at their next event.
I do.

Work & Cook: How to cook a dinner party for 6+5+2 on a conference day?

A week ago I invited friends to come over for dinner on Saturday. A few days later I found out there is a going to be a bloggers’ conference that day. Hmmm, what to do? I want to see my friends. I want to go to the conference. How can I have a cake and eat it too? I needed a plan.

Here is how I did it.

The guests:
I invited two families with kids to come over. That meant I had to cook for (including us) 6 adults, 5 kids, and 2 babies who eat small-cut finger food. That is about 10 adult portions.
Some people like beef, some like fish, some like lamb, but everyone likes chicken. Each one has his/her own likes and dislikes, so I wanted some variety with the side dishes to cover everyone’s preferences.

The menu:
In general, I like to make one flavorful entrée and two simple side dishes so the flavors of the different dishes don’t compete with each other or overwhelm the palate.
Another helpful thing is the cooking technique. In this case – roasting. If you want to make your life easy when cooking for a dinner party and be able to spend time with your friends instead of cooking while they entertain themselves or watch you slave in the kitchen, “roasting” is the key word. I decided on:

Roasted Moroccan-inspired marinated chicken
Roasted carrots
Roasted root vegetable
Roasted potatoes
Roasted beets with balsamic vinaigrette
Couscous with dried fruits and pine nuts
Vegetables salad
Pine nuts cake served with Rose water custard

Again, you can get by honorably with one entrée and two side dishes, but I wanted to impress and have plenty.

The plan:
The conference is on Saturday from 10 am to 4 pm. We wanted dinner to start at 6:30 pm. That meant I needed to do some cooking on Friday, or to be more precise, baking.

Friday
Make dessert. Bake the cake and make the custard.
Since the oven was already warm and working I scrubbed the beets and baked them for 1 hour.
Also, I toasted the pine nuts for the couscous.
Salad is a last minute item because you want it to be fresh and crisp, so I asked my friend to bring the salad. But if you want to do it yourself, you can use mixed greens and throw in some cherry tomatoes, croutons, if you want, and such ingredients. There’s no washing, slicing or dicing to do. Make a quick vinaigrette or use bottled one.

Saturday
Morning, 8-9 am:
Still in my PJ and drinking my coffee, I prepared the marinade for the chicken, covered and refrigerated it.
Diced the dried fruit for the couscous.
Asked the husband to set the table during the day between activities with the kiddies

Afternoon, 4 – 5 pm:
Prepare carrots and root vegetables.

Place potatoes and chicken on a large baking sheet.

5 pm: Put everything in a 350 F degree oven 1 - 1 ½ hours before dinner time. It is almost impossible to overcook vegetables and chicken thighs in a 350 F oven.

Peel and slice the beets and make quick vinaigrette for them.

Prepare couscous 5 minutes before dinner time. Add and mix with fruits and pine nuts.

Serve. Time to eat.

I like to serve family style. This way there is a lot of interaction around the table, plates and dishes are moving around, guests help each other and the kids, talk about the food, I try to convince people to taste food they claim they don’t like. There’s a lot of action.
Then it gets quiet as people start to eat…
Then it is action-discussion time again and a lot of fun.

I love having leftovers.
I love having leftovers because it means a day without cooking.
So Saturday’s leftover is going to be a wonderful Sunday lunch (see photo above), and I have some cake and custard for our game night with friends tonight.

PS – I did not post recipes as I believe you have your own or can find them in so many places on the web and your cookbooks.
If you do want a recipe, e-mail me at: nurit AT familyfriendlyfood DOT com

More dinner ideas:
Weekly menu plan
Pork schnitzel, potato-yam mash, roasted cauliflower
How to spend more time with your kids AND have a daily home-made meal
Roasted chicken with orange-mustard marinade, yellow jasmine rice, steamed broccoli
Rib-eye steak, grits, cherry tomatoes and butter lettuce salad
Grilled potatoes, corn, and lamb with yogurt-mint sauce

jamie’s dinners by Jamie Oliver

(The photo is copied from Jamie Oliver's web site and apears in his cookbook).

My friend T. brought me this cookbook for my birthday. I cooked Oliver’s recipes in the past and didn’t go crazy for them because of their simplicity – they don’t call him The Naked Chef for nothing (no, he doesn’t cook naked). Back then I was into more French style cooking, very elaborate, many steps, the more complicated the better, etc.

I changed my style of cooking after realizing two things: 1) I cook for hours and the food is gone in 20 minutes, and 2) I spend hours in the kitchen instead of spending time with my precious husband and kids. So I have done some serious rethinking. Then I started watching Jamie Oliver’s and Ina Garten’s shows on the Food Network channel and learned how I can prepare fabulous meals in no time.

It was a very helpful lesson as a personal chef too. Cooking in other people’s home the way I did before I would have had to move in with them. Not sure they would have liked that so much.

So this book is right kind of book for me now. I tried these recipes below. They were so easy to make and a no brainer. It’s a good book for the home cook (ooh, a rhyme!) who doesn’t have much time (another rhyme!).

Here is the recipe to the chicken in the photo above, taken from Jamie Oliver’s web site. It is basically, put everything in a dish and cook it ‘till it’s done.

Tender and crisp chicken legs with sweet tomatoes

This recipe takes literally minutes to put together but then requires slow, gentle cooking. However, in return for your patience, what happens in the pan from just a couple of ingredients is an absolute joy and never fails, so it’s a good one to serve if you have guests.

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 4 chicken legs, preferably free-range or organic, jointed

• sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

• a big bunch of fresh basil, leaves picked, stalks finely chopped

• 2 big handfuls of red and yellow cherry tomatoes, halved, and ripe plum tomatoes, quartered

• 1 whole bulb of garlic, broken up into cloves

• 1 fresh red chilli, finely chopped• olive oil

optional:

• 1 x 14 oz. can of cannellini beans, drained

• 2 handfuls of new potatoes, scrubbed

Preheat your oven to 180°C/350°F/gas 4. Season your chicken pieces all over and put them into a snug-fitting pan in one layer. Throw in all the basil leaves and stalks, then chuck in your tomatoes. Scatter the garlic cloves into the pan with the chopped chili and drizzle over some olive oil. Mix around a bit, pushing the tomatoes underneath. Place in the oven for 1½ hours, turning the tomatoes halfway through (I didn’t touch the pan until it was done – N.), until the chicken skin is crisp and the meat falls off the bone.

If you fancy, you can add some drained cannellini beans or some sliced new potatoes to the pan and cook them with the chicken. Or you can serve the chicken with some simple mashed potato. Squeeze the garlic out of the skins before serving. You could even make it part of a pasta dish – remove the chicken meat from the bone and shred it, then toss into a bowl of linguini or spaghetti and serve at once.

Jamie's recipe for Lamb with chickpeas, yogurt and pan-roasted veg

serves 4 – 6 (even 8-10, perfect for a holiday meal, or a big dinner party – N.)

1 leg of lamb, butterflied and opened up like a book

2 teaspoons coriander seeds

3 cloves of garlic, peeled and finely choppeda large bunch of fresh cilantro, chopped

a large bunch of fresh mint, chopped

1 x 14 oz. can of chickpeas, drained

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

juice of 1/2 a lemon

1 x 500ml tub of natural yogurt (I used goat yogurt - N.)

12 baby turnips, scrubbed

a bunch of baby carrots, scrubbed, tops left on

1 butternut squash, unpeeled, cut into 8 wedges

2 red onions, peeled and quartered

1 whole bulb of garlic, broken into cloves

2 teaspoons ground cumin

extra virgin olive oil

Score the lamb on both sides. Using either a pestle and mortar or a food processor, grind or whizz up the coriander seeds with the garlic, fresh coriander, mint and half the chickpeas until you have a paste. Season the paste or "marinade" with salt and freshly ground black pepper, then add the lemon juice and yogurt. Place half of this flavored yogurt in a large plastic bag and add the lamb. Put the other half of the flavored yogurt in the fridge. Tie the bag up to seal it and turn it around to allow the yogurt to coat all the lamb. Leave to marinate for at least an hour, but up to 24 hours in the fridge.

Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/gas 6. Place the turnips and carrots in a roasting tray with the squash, onions, garlic and remaining chickpeas, then sprinkle with the cumin, salt and pepper. Drizzle with olive oil and toss together to coat. Remove the lamb from the marinade, then place the meat directly on the oven rack with the tray of vegetables on the shelf below. Cook for about 1 hour, tossing the vegetables halfway through. Serve the lamb well cooked with the vegetables and flavored yogurt on the side.

I am a fan.
Have an easy and fun time cooking!

To buy the book, click here.

If you liked this cookbook review, you might be interested to read:

Beef Goulash

Jewish Cooking For Dummies cookbook

Thanksgiving-y chicken dinner

Nurit