Rehovot

Chicken scallopini with some kind of red-wine-red-currant sauce that used up our last 1/3 of a cup of wine. Goodbye, wine, we hardly knew ye.... "Christmas" salad: tomatoes, cukes, red peppers, balsamic vinegar. Risotto from my great-aunt's recipe! Unbelievably good. Baked Czech dessert called "zemlovka" involving a layer of milk-soaked roll pieces, a layer of sweetened ricotta and raisins, topped with sliced apples. Still trying to get over the sweetened ricotta........never had that before. But quite tasty, overall.

Roasted red-pepper, chicken, and parm/mozzarella puff-pastry tart for dinner. Mmmmmmmmmmmoussaka, the night before, inspired by photos from this thread, last week.

Dinner was not at home last night; elsewhere, catered, faaaaaaaancy. Lovely, lovely spread: roasted and grilled vegetables, roasted figs stuffed with sweet cheese and nuts, chicken-and-herb-cheese skewers, aromatic rice with lots of hidden spices, and (my favorite) sweet potato ravioli. Medsuyan! Excellent! Oh, wait, I did make a snack beforehand: open-faced little ham sandwiches on baguette slices, each with potato salad, hard-boiled egg, and slices of cheese, pickle, and red pepper. Hard to balance all that on a baguette round....gotta eat 'em fast.

Look at those baguettes! Heck, look at everything! Can I get a table for two at your house for next Sunday's dinner? Since I got home late after class, dinner was...fast. Salad with homemade creamy garlic dressing, and sliced marmalade-glazed chicken. The description, there, is larger than was the actual meal.

Wow, thanks for the bounty of great advice, everyone. Lots of helpful details that would never have occurred to me... Swisskaese, sorry I didn't get to look at this until now. But the event doesn't have to be L' Mehedrin. Great idea about the bakeries--there are two good ones I know of, and I'll go ask them for help w/ parve desserts. (Maybe you can get your cousin to spill the beans on where the other great bakeries are lurking in Rehovot.) Yay. I get to keep my friends and luxuriate in dessert. Ahhhh.

I'm hosting a post-dinner evening get-together for a club/organization, and I just found out that anything I serve as the hostess (with the mostess) must be brought in from outside the home, and must bear the kosher hechsher. The hechsher is the kosher stamp on the packaging, right? Yep...I'm kosherly clueless, so bear with the dumb questions: are nuts kosher? Do they have to be in a package with the stamp? Is dried bulk fruit (or fresh fruit, for that matter)? Are most bakeries? What would you serve? I don't want to screw up or offend anyone at this meeting... they might kick me out, and then I'd be up a creek for New Friends in a Foreign Country. Thanks and toda raba for the help!

Went to a dinner party last week that left my confidence in my cooking abilities in a tailspin.... The hostess gracefully whipped up great spicy chicken and pasta (w/ good sauce) for 7. Using someone else's kitchen, at that. Very good, very elegant. Somehow, turkey tetrazzini (Fri.'s dinner) does not seem very elegant. But it was good. And a challah-sour-cherry bread pudding experiment turned out quite well.

Chilled lemon chicken. Diced tomato and cucumber salad with lots of baby mozzarella. (Fresh mozz for 11 shekels! (approx. $2) Life is good.) Quick cheese biscuits. Dessert would have been sour cherry clafoutis, but was a humbler concoction involving yogurt and chocolate-chip cake. Sounds like summer food....'cause it's STILL summer here. Sigh.

Dinner for me and the Czech was my shot #2 at a Traditional Dish: boiled beef with creamy veg. sauce and dumplings, along with braised red cabbage. Ok, the first part is better than it sounds, but it's going to take me a long time to get used to a culture that boils beef. Why, why, why? Tomorrow I take back the menu with minestrone. Glad to join y'all.