What do you do for company dinner?
I'm struggling to remember the sorts of things I made for company while we were in Paris.
"While we were in Paris," in case you were wondering, refers to that golden age when we had 1) an income, 2) free time, and 3) access to the world's tastiest ingredients. So, I bought stuff for full price. And it was really, really tasty. And I had all day to get ready for company.
Obviously, things have changed since then.
But I'm still trying to remember.
I used to make crepes, spicy seafood pasta, chicken normandy, or moroccan tagine. Salad or pumpkin soup was usually the appetizer. I can't remember what desserts I used to serve. Ice cream with homemade cookies? Gingerbread sometimes? Oh, dessert crepes sometimes, too. Sometimes we just bought something from the local pastry shop. Yummo!
I never made pizza, because pizza was what we made for Pizza Night. Every other Tuesday, between 25 and 75 (we never knew which) college kids and young adults would come for Pizza Night. We made ten pizzas--about double the size of your standard cookie sheet--from scratch. Everything but the dough. We bought the raw dough from the local boulanger, rolled it out, doused it with my secret recipe pizza sauce (which I actually got from the previous youth worker, who was trained as a fancy French chef), and then threw some toppings on. Anywhere from two to ten kids showed up ahead of time to help us prepare.
So I know how to make pizza.
Pizza is mostly what we make for company, now, because it fits all our new restrictions: lack of money, lack of time, and lack of quality ingredients (even with an expanded budget, we couldn't get cherries that taste like cherries taste in July in Paris).
What do you make? What are some of your "for-special" meals?
Comments (4)
We don't do "for special" too much. When we entertain, it is always very casual. But sometimes we have more expensive ingredients while wearing our flip flops and t-shirts. Like this shrimp recipe:
http://amylovesbud.blogspot.com/2005/07/4th-of-july-rundown.html
The brining of the shrimp makes is so very good!
We don't entertain much at all. When cooking for others, a couple of standards are:
Pecan Breaded Dijon Chicken
Lemon and Artichoke Chicken
Meat Lasagna and a Veggie Lasagna
Grilled meats and vegetables
We don't do fancy. We don't do desserts often. I am not a baker so we usually just buy nice ice cream or a cheesecake. Mostly, just a fresh fruit salad will do for me.
Vegetarian lasagna
Stir fry beef
Papa John's Pizza
A lot of our special meals are tied to the Jewish calendar.
So for Passover, this year, I learned to make a new Wine and Nut cake to create some variety from my usual Pan de Pesach--12 egg cake.
At Shavuot--coming up!--we make a dairy meal that always included borscht and blintzes, and homemade ice cream sundaes for after hearing the ten commandments.
Rosh Hashanah--that always has some kind of tsimmes (a yam, carrot and prune dish) with meat.
Channukah--latkes with applesauce, honey roasted chicken.
And there are others...