Chufi

Baked penne pasta with eggplant and ricotta, not a good pic but at least it's an 'action shot' Balsamic roast onions Braised escarole and beans. This was the hit of the evening. Everyone oh'd and ah'd over this! Really delicious, fragrant with lemon juice, garlic and chili, the sweet beans and slightly bitter greens. I really love that long table with everybody around it, talking and eating. (actually half the table is a door, which we take off the hinges once a year to make this set up! ) Dessert: Orange semolina cake with honey syrup, mascarpone and pistachios chocolate cherry cake (from Nigella Lawson's How to be a domestic goddess, wonderful, it has a whole jar of cherry preserves mixed into the batter) Another Nigella recipe, marzipan cake Served with raspberries and white chocolate brandy sauce The next morning: breakfast Thank you everybody for thinking with me and inspiring me. See you next year on this thread!

Dinner report! The menu changed a bit. The guestlist was up to 17, and all of a sudden the idea of rolling and drying and hanging and cooking and laying out on towels and assembling lasagna for 17, made me panic. Then I remembered the dinner last year, which was great and wonderful and impressive, but also more work than I ever again want to do for a dinner, and I remembered the nervous breakdown I had last year a couple of hours before the guests arrived when there was still So Much To Do, and I thought: haven't I learned anything? Keep it simple! The guests really won't care! okay maybe the eGulleters will scold me for planning lasagna and then not making it , but, I will ust have to risk it! So. The Baroque Ragu from The Splendid Table (as suggested by Pontormo) became baked penne instead of lasagna. And I made another pasta dish, Shaya's eggplant and ricotta sauce. Appetizers remained roughly the same. I added roasted balasamic onions to the main course. Abra's suggestion of bitter greens led me to the braised escarole & white beans from Molly Stevens' All about braising. It was a wondeful dinner. I made some of the appetizers on Thursdaynight, baked 2 cakes Fridaynight, and cooked all day Saturday but at a leisurely pace, with my favorite music, and was completely relaxed. There was a ton of food with lots of leftovers - most guests went home with a little container of pasta and a piece of cake! Pictures! Assembling the penne. This ragu is amazing - spiced with cloves and cinnamon, with lots of meat (chicken, chickenlivers, sausage, beef, pancetta). Here it's already mixed with the bechamel. Poached fresh tuna, marinated with capers olive oil and anchovies. Fantastic. Like eating the very best canned tuna imaginable. This is a recipe from Marcella Hazan's Marcella's Kitchen. Ham, mozzarella, roasted fennel Green pea frittata This is from Marcella Says: chicken breast pate with black olives. Flavored with lemon zest and nutmeg. While it has a great flavor, the texture of the pureed chicken breast is a bit weird. I added a lot of butter to make it creamy and spreadable. Still, it was a big hit. Celeriac fritters. The parsnips looked so sad at the market, so I made the fritters with celeriac instead. Really good. On the table.

I put the contents in a small glass jar and keep in the fridge. Keeps for months.

I think Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson had carbonara in bed together in Heartburn

I'm with you Abra. Supertaster who loves coffee, brussel sprouts, spinach, grapefruit etc. ← same here ← and here!

could you tell me more about that and maybe direct me to a recipe? is it something made with jajang paste, or eaten together with jajangmyun?

Finally made my jajang myun today. It took me a long time to find that black bean paste! I became obsessed with it! Boy was this a good dinner. I was thinking that this would make an awesome hangover-cure. Almost worth getting the hangover for Now that I have my big tub of jajang/chunjang paste, what else can I do with it?

I finally got round to making the Korean dish Jajang Myon - noodles with vegetables, pork and blackbean paste - that had been haunting me ever since I saw ChryZ's pictorial over here on the Korean Cooking thread sorry for the bad pic, something is wrong with my white balance!

happened to see that on tv here a week ago! Simply Irresistible with Sarah Michelle Gellar as the girl who cooks with magic.

thanks Forest! The pancakes came fresh out of the frying pan, but by the time I had fried them all, they were all lukewarm and not hot anymore. Yes, you could certainly do something with the creme fraiche - add some lemon, or herbs maybe (I had dill in the pancakes, but tarragon would be nice as well).

aha. That has to be Baby Boom! I have a personal weakness for Diane Keaton. Love every movie she's in... even this one

I don't think this question was answered. I also bought chunjang yesterday, and the guy at the oriental store told me it is the same as jajang. Googling seems to confirm it...

Shaya how wonderful to see your dinners again! That moussaka is gorgeous. And I love the look on your son's face as he's reaching for the avocado. Shalmanese I really like that bananabread. Shoutsandmurmurs welcome to the dinner thread, wonderful dinner! Sazji those beans are bean-perfection. jmolimari those are some very sexy chocolatecakes It's my husband's birthday tomorrow and in the tradition of this household, we try to stretch out the celebrations as much as possible. So yesterday was a simple familydinner, not very glamorous but all the food items were requested by my husband so what can you do started with zucchini pancakes with smoked salmon and creme fraiche Lemon & thyme meatballs in onion gravy. We had these over polenta, with brussel sprouts. I also made this mushroom pasta gratin because I suspected that our parents would not like polenta (I was right). dessert was warm pineapple upside down cake with caramel icecream.

I hate recipes like that. Minutes before I read this thread I was thinking about this one, it's very common: 1 pound chicken thighs, bones removed. I never know if that means "take 1 pound and remove the bones" or "take 1 pound boneless thighs".

That's my favorite of all the Austen adaptations! yeah, boiled mutton galore! I love this quote from one of her letters: "Good applepies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness". Jane Grigson has a chapter about Austen in her "Food with the famous". I agree with Grigson that "Emma" is the most fun, foodwise - with that hypochonder of a father who is always sending back the good stuff to the kitchen because he thinks it's unhealthy, leaving his guests to snack on water and biscuits !

So much wonderful food! Bruce's glistening tuna, Wendy's gorgeous Valentine's dinner, and Nishla's chorizo/potato/egg dish.. one of my favorite flavor combinations. stage: put food on 2 plates put one plate in front of my husband and tell him to start eating rush to the bedroom with the other plate and camera, because that's where the best (adjustable) light is point light at plate of food take picture (no flash, low angle if possible) rush back to kitchen or dining room with plate find my husband there, patiently waiting for me. sometimes I just can't be bothered with all that and I take a pic in the kitchen, but I'm always diappointed because the light isn't good. btw lucy I think your pics look great!

Dinner at Daniel's... something the rest of us can only hope for.. Thanks for sharing that! Megan what's the yellow stuff underneath our steak tartare? btw I would be exhausted after a lunch like that too! Don't tell me you had to go back to work after that You know I learned the Diet Coke trick from your first blog? Whenever I buy a bottle at the cafetaria at work, after an evening of maybe one or 2 glasses of jenever too many, I think of you, and your quote: "it will cure whatever it is that ails ya". And it DOES work! Nice legacy huh?

Maybe I missed an episode, but does anyone know what happened to Sookies ratatouille vegetables? She got a free delivery from a farmer one day, made ratatouille and it ended up so much better than her usual, with the vegetables from Jackson. Was this ever developed, ie did she have to choose between Jackson and the other vegetable guy?

I like the idea of the cipollini. Would be great with a platter of prosciutto and salami. Now, where to find tiny onions.. The menu so far. First course: several appetizers, on the table, served in what is I believe in te US called 'family style' "help yourself" crostini with pea/mintpuree crostini with chicken/blackolive spread (Marcella recipe) parsnip fritters platters of cured meats, possibly with something vinegary on the side like the cipollini markemorse mentioned. miniature versions of the Sicilian swordfish impanata. Possibly. Or I'll have to think of something else 'fishy'. 2 lasagna's. 1 Bolognese or some other ragu (over in the Italy forum I've been getting some wonderful suggestions), 1 more vegetable-based one. a huge leafy green salad does this course need something else? I know you're not really supposed to serve something else with lasagne, but it just seems kind of sparse to have nothing else on the plate. Pontormo suggested mushrooms. Some sort of roasted vegetable dish? dessert: orange/honey/pistachiocake almond cake with a drizzle of dark chocolate ganache, served with raspberries and white chocolate custard. I won't claim this is an authentically Italian dinner but I'm pretty happy with it so far, especially because I think I'll be able to do lots of work ahead.

Thanks for the great suggestions everyone! I would love to do the artichoke lasagna, but it's impossible to find decent artichokes here this time of year. (not to mention the fact that I HATE cleaning those things about as much as I LOVE eating them.) this is true ofcourse. I'm toying with the idea of a belgian endive/radicchio/ smoked bacon lasagna, because I love that flavor combo, and because I think the smokiness and slight bitterness would be a nice contrast with the sweet Bolognese. Pontormo, I do have the Splendid Table book (finally!) The Dukes of Ferrara recipe does look really intriguing. So now I'm thinking of doing that instead of the Bolognese... It's really interesting, I had a hard time imagining lasagna without tomatoes, and now I'm spoilt for choice

Sometimes I soak and sometimes I don't. I feel (but I've never done an actual experiment with a side-by-side-test) that while no soak beans get cooked, and are perfectly good to eat, soaked beans are just a little softer, plumper, more lusciously textured. I mean, the soaking is no hard work, it just means you have to plan a bit more.

For a big dinner, I'm making a lasagna with Bolognese (and spinach pasta). I want to make a second, different lasagna so people can choose (or have both ). I know the Bolognese is not really that tomato-y, but still I think it would be nicer if the second one has no tomatosauce at all. Any ideas? Oh and I never know if I should call it lasagna or lasagne..

lucylou, it was Foodman who made that spaghetti, on the Emilia/Romagna thread here in the Italy forum. Ann, I missed your gorgeous pictures! Good to see you back on the thread!

ah, Megan! This will be a lovely week. I enjoyed your first blog so much, I was always secretly hoping you´d do another one! The marrowbones look outrageous and wonderful...

Chervil soup!