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Adventures In Cooking
Feb. 24th, 2011 09:01 pmSo the cookbook project may be done, but that doesn't mean that I'm through experimenting with food. If anything, the playing around and exploring has left me with a bit of a taste for trying new (and occasionally bizarre) recipes.
So last week, when I was invited to help make finger food for a friend's party, I happily accepted. Cooking for friends is always a delight, and while I am known mostly as a baker, I have a deep-seated love of appetizers (mostly, I'll admit, because they're tiny and adorable), and I almost never get to make them - they're not the most practical food choice when I'm cooking for my husband and myself.
The suggestion I got for what to bring was 'something fried, maybe, or something involving macaroni and cheese.' I love having a direction to go in, because in some ways it lets me be more creative, a bit like writing poetry in a particular form, so I spent at least one happy afternoon browsing the internet and my cookbooks for macaroni and cheese-style appetizers, having decided that fried foods, while tasty, would probably not travel or sit well.
And I found about eight hundred recipes for individual macaroni and cheeses baked in mini muffin tins. And not much else. And I could have made that, but it sounded kind of... well... yummy, sure, but not that interesting or creative. So I kept looking. And I found, finally, a recipe for mac&cheese imitation sushi. And I knew I had found my recipe.
Except, of course, being me, I couldn't leave well enough alone. The original recipe called for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and leftover taco meat. Nowhere near acceptable for a fancy party, in my humble opinion, so the base was rapidly replaced with my new favorite four-cheese mac&cheese, and the filling with roasted red peppers and either prosciutto or dill pickles. And then I decided to bread the rolls with panko bread crumbs, because hey, if you're going to set out lilies you might as well gild them.
And then I spent most of an afternoon trying to figure out how to press, roll, and wrap pasta into cylinders, and praying that they wouldn't fall apart when I tried to slice them.
The end results were, while not perfect, surprisingly cool....
( (Mediocre) picture hidden behind the cut.... )
Taste-wise, they were.... okay, they won't win any awards, but they were pretty darn good. The only real downside is that, to maintain structural integrity, they need to be served warm-but-not-hot. Other than that, they were fun, they were good, and the tastes blended surprisingly well....
So last week, when I was invited to help make finger food for a friend's party, I happily accepted. Cooking for friends is always a delight, and while I am known mostly as a baker, I have a deep-seated love of appetizers (mostly, I'll admit, because they're tiny and adorable), and I almost never get to make them - they're not the most practical food choice when I'm cooking for my husband and myself.
The suggestion I got for what to bring was 'something fried, maybe, or something involving macaroni and cheese.' I love having a direction to go in, because in some ways it lets me be more creative, a bit like writing poetry in a particular form, so I spent at least one happy afternoon browsing the internet and my cookbooks for macaroni and cheese-style appetizers, having decided that fried foods, while tasty, would probably not travel or sit well.
And I found about eight hundred recipes for individual macaroni and cheeses baked in mini muffin tins. And not much else. And I could have made that, but it sounded kind of... well... yummy, sure, but not that interesting or creative. So I kept looking. And I found, finally, a recipe for mac&cheese imitation sushi. And I knew I had found my recipe.
Except, of course, being me, I couldn't leave well enough alone. The original recipe called for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and leftover taco meat. Nowhere near acceptable for a fancy party, in my humble opinion, so the base was rapidly replaced with my new favorite four-cheese mac&cheese, and the filling with roasted red peppers and either prosciutto or dill pickles. And then I decided to bread the rolls with panko bread crumbs, because hey, if you're going to set out lilies you might as well gild them.
And then I spent most of an afternoon trying to figure out how to press, roll, and wrap pasta into cylinders, and praying that they wouldn't fall apart when I tried to slice them.
The end results were, while not perfect, surprisingly cool....
( (Mediocre) picture hidden behind the cut.... )
Taste-wise, they were.... okay, they won't win any awards, but they were pretty darn good. The only real downside is that, to maintain structural integrity, they need to be served warm-but-not-hot. Other than that, they were fun, they were good, and the tastes blended surprisingly well....
