No wonder I’m so dang tired right now.  There’s been a big heaping of hustle-your-bustle this quarter.  I really get what people meant about 2nd Quarter showing you what you’re really made of.  Yep.  I definitely am seeing the stuff I’m made of.   Just not a lot of time to think about it. 

One of my classmates has been cooking in commercial kitchens for 15 years, since he was 16.  Another was the head of a kitchen for many many years.   They are not as challenged as the rest of us.  But as for the rest of us… whew.

In order, the four last weeks’ stations were:

1. Sous Chef (My partner and I did the leading thing for the rest of the class that week)

2. Breakfast/Asian Station (Two days of making breakfast-for-lunch, then two days for making the assigned Asian dishes)

3. Butchery (We fabricated meats needed by our classmates for their dishes, plus we make our own entrée for Student Lunch)

4. Sushi/Stocks, Sauces & Soups (Two days of sushi, one day of stocks & sauces, then one day in the Bistro kitchen making soup for the actual Public At Large)

These were intense weeks.  Sous Chef was alright, actually.  I activated my inner Sixth Grade Teacher and got organized.  It felt like a successful week, and I received good feedback from people about how the kitchen was “run.” 

Even so, it was exhausting.  At times I had some misanthropic feelings, especially towards folks who acted ungracious when we served them lunch.  There were not many of them, but they sucked.  As they say, the only people complaining about student lunch are the people who are not making student lunch. 

I didn’t complain last quarter, and I sure as hell will not complain in quarters to come.  On principle.  Even if they serve me crap-on-a-plate.  I’ll just eat salad.  I’ve seen it from the front lines: people are doing their best.

Breakfast and Asian Station were fun but took longer than I would have expected.  My favorite parts of that week were making phad thai with an industrial wok (the dish pictured above was my practice run of that dish), and the shirred eggs and “overnight” waffles with yeast.  A pastry student from the program asked me for the recipe for the waffles.  Waffle awesomeness! 

Butchery was a station that I expected to love but then didn’t.  I left school every day feeling frustrated and raw.  I liked the actual butchery part, but I think there were some ways that the station was set up that weren’t conducive to our learning.  Here’s some meat!  Go! 

Even so, I had some good experiences that week. My partner and I deboned chickens while still intact (remember when Chef showed us earlier in the quarter? Now we can do it, too!!)  and made a “ballotine” by rolling it with a stuffing, cinnamon-roll-style, then serving it with a Madeira sauce.  I also got to make a smoked pork roast that I deboned myself.  In the near future I need to continue to work on chicken fabrication, because our end-of-quarter knife competency will be cutting up chickens in different ways, in a certain number of minutes. 

This week my sushi rotation went well, although slow.  Anyone in the sushi station has to decide: perfect and beautiful sushi, or get ‘er out there?  I, and the helpers that were assigned to me, tried to make mostly beautiful sushi.   So I wouldn’t call us early.  Anyway, I’m glad we got it out without Chef KG saying, “Where’s the sushi?”  (Which he will do, if you’re too, too late).  One thing I felt proud of in this station was my mis en place (how all my ingredients were set up before I got started).  Things were organized and neat.  This felt good, especially with a project that has so many ingredients.  Also especially because my mis en place outside of school is more like “Holy crap, where’s the baking soda?!?”

Soup station yesterday was a wonderful moment in time.  I was in the 3rd Quarter kitchen, and it was one of the most relaxed days I’ve had in the kitchen so far.   There wasn’t much to do, and everyone was relatively chilled out.  After making some salmon chowder and cleaning & steaming some mussels, I had a chance to taste eight or nine dishes from the 5th quarter “COD (Chef of the Day)” project.  This was inspiring and fascinating.  3 students’ menus were being presented that day, so plate after beautiful plate was being sent back to the kitchen for Chef Vicky to grade. 

After she finished tasting and rating a plate, she would put it on the counter, which happened to be at my station, for the students to try.  People would come over with spoons to taste, reflect, and react.  I was ladling up stock into containers to freeze, so I just went through a soothing process of taste, ladle, reflect, taste, ladle,  reflect.  Having the time to ponder on  different flavor combinations was so different from the rest of this action-packed quarter.  It felt collegial, magical.  Everyone passing by was interested and had a different, personal reaction to what they tried. 

It was also cool to listen to the chefs’ reactions.  The beets gratin from an Eastern Bloc menu, which I particularly loved, were also exciting to Chef Vicky.  She pointed out that the crisp part at the bottom was particularly delicious.  A few minutes later I passed through Chef KG’s (our) kitchen and saw the same dish sitting there at a table.  I commented to Chef KG that I loved that gratin, and he said, “Yeah.  A little overcooked,though.”  Really?  I went to taste it again, from the dish in his kitchen, and sure enough, that plate’s gratin had a little tougher consistency than the one in 3rd quarter kitchen.  I wonder what happened to make the two gratins turn out so differently.  I also wonder what it will be like in just a few quarters when I’m making my own COD project.   

There have been some other glimmers of excitement and culinary inspiration:  Yesterday morning Chef KG showed us some fun cuts and garnishes, including making cherry blossoms (and plum blossoms) from carrots, and carving a ball inside a cage with a potato.  Who cares if you never cook with that potato? It is so dang cool.  I will definitely carve another one and take a pic for your amusement. 

Also, there’s a tapas competition coming up at school.  The two winners will then go to Spain to compete with people around the world with their tapas.  I’m going to submit some ideas to Chef Karin (which is what we’re supposed to do to see if we qualify for the next round).  So my mind is constantly mumbling to itself about flavor ideas right now.  It’s a good feeling.

Anyway, I’m tired.  I feel compelled, for posterity’s sake, to record what I “produced” in these last 16 school days:

Breakfast:

• Shirred eggs with gruyere and cayenne
• Eggs Benedict with shaved ham
• Omelets with shallots, mushrooms, and fresh thyme
• Eggs over easy
• Light & fluffy pancakes
• Overnight waffles (with yeast)
• Hash browns
• Sausage

Asian Station

• Tenshin Don (Rice bowl with crab omelet, peas, and sauce)
• Phad Thai

Butchery

• Chicken Ballotine with Madeira Sauce
• Smoked Pork Shoulder
• Roasted Chicken au Jus Lié

Sushi

• Nigiri:
  • Ebi (shrimp)
  • Atsuyaki Tamago (omelet)
  • Unagi (freshwater eel)
• Hosomaki (small rolls with nori on outside of roll):
  • Kampyo (dried, rehydrated gourd) roll 
  • Tekuwan (pickled daikon radish) roll
  • Kappa Maki (cucumber roll)
• California roll
• Futomaki (”Fat” roll with tamago, kampyo, spinach, mushroom, and denbu–pink fish flakes)

Stocks and Sauces:

• Espagnole sauce
• Brown roux
• Halibut fumet

Soups

• Salmon chowder

Second Quarter’s Practicum–our main class–is called “Quantity Cooking.”  As I’ve said before, we’re cooking for all the culinary students at our school.  Before knowing anything about the school, I assumed it would be more like banquet-style–creating enormous vats of food and spooning portions from chafing dishes over sterno flames.  This is not the case. 

Instead, if you’re making entrées, you need to time it so that you churn out several at a time, because the students come at anytime between 11 and 12:30.  Is there a regularity to their arrival?  Not really.  It’s all based on what’s going on in that class’s reality that day.  Sometimes they come in for lunch in waves, and other times they trickle in like a leaky faucet.  Sometimes we have too many plates available to be picked up, sometimes not enough.

This makes it more of a challenge to feed them fresh, hot food.  You should see how quickly a plate of perfect pasta can dry out under the lamp.

Swedish Meatballs were a perfect first-day item to serve.  Now there’s some banquet food.  If I had to, I could have cooked them all at the same time and served them in a hotel pan over the course of an  hour and a half, no problem.  The Mediterranean-Style Quinoa Wraps were also a great make-ahead, and they seemed to go fast, too. 

The Fusilli with Italian Sausage, Roasted Tomatos and Braising Greens? Not as easy, because there was last-minute sautéeing involved.  The Salmon en Papillote was another toughie.  Sharing ovens with other people can get tricky, especially with fish.  Especially if people change the oven temp for their own dish–while your fish is cooking in there–and you don’t know it.  Especially if your papillote (parchment envelope) is the size of the Goodyear Blimp and your portion of salmon is just shy of 4 ounces.  Note: if you make that recipe, make sure you make an envelope that is proportioned to the fillings, otherwise it will dry out (or leak)!

Anyway, not a single dish I made ended up tasting as good as when I make it at home.  Big surprise!  Actually, it was a big surprise.  But the other big surprise is the positive feedback I got for dishes anyway.   People liked each of those menu items, and took the time to tell me so.   I had to battle with myself to keep from blurting, “Really?!” or “It’s usually waaaay better.”   A few times, with some of my friends, I did admit that it’s usually better when I make it at home.

BUT!

Julia Child’s wisdom, to never apologize for your cooking, is great advice.   At bare minimum, you diminish their enjoyment of the food by criticizing it.   So most of the time, when someone said they liked my (dry, but on-other-occasions tender and juicy) salmon, I would try to just smile and say, “Thank you.”  Because just as my food was a (hastily wrapped) gift to them, their kind words were a gift to me.  So I should just take the valentine and smile. 

Today’s the last day I’m on the “student entree” rotation, which means the food I’ll cook for the rest of the quarter will usually be recipes assigned to me, rather than ones I bring myself.  Today I’ll have another chance to be gracious and grateful.  My goal today? No apologies or explanations.  Only thanks.

I have an enthusiastic, almost unnatural love of the dish pit.   It’s a big, fast, messy game to me to get the dishes cleaned.  The faster, the better.  I always think of dishwashers (in restaurants) as the drummers of the place.  Not subtle mellow jazz drummers, though.  More like that wacky Animal on the Muppet Show.  At least the dishwashers I like.  The ones that yell, “Bring it on!” and pace around their soapy domains like caged tigers.  So this week I embrace my inner muppet drummer, I guess you could say.  LET’S GO!

Meanwhile, next week my partner and I have “Student Entree” as our station, which means we’re coming up with menu items to serve.  This is one of the creativity portions of the quarter.  Anyway, one of the days I’m assigned to do a vegetarian dish.  Looking through a couple cookbooks for inspiration, I saw a recipe entitled “Mediterranean Quinoa.”  This both inspired me and led me on a real culinary wild goose chase. 

The actual recipe didn’t excite me, but suddenly Mediterranean Quinoa was the only thing on earth, apparently, that would do for the menu.  Sometimes I get stuck on an idea and can’t let it go.  So I made quinoa and made it into a salad:  artichoke hearts, kalamata olives, mint, red bell peppers, onion, feta cheese, lemon juice, olive oil, you know. All the good things in life.    However, as a quinoa salad it fell flat.  Actually, it fell quite sharp–as in, tart, bright, and no depth. 

To bring full, round flavors I added garbanzo beans, and then to make it more creamy I made some tzatziki, thanks to the great recipe provided by Kristen.  I tasted all this together, and it still just was wrong, wrong wrong.  Too much goo and not enough crunch.  Then it occurred to me: why not make this into a sandwich, or better yet, a wrap?  1/4 cup of tzatziki plus a cup of the quinoa salad, topped with lettuce and onions and wrapped in a whole wheat tortilla.  Hot dang!  We have a great vegetarian item for next week. 

This whole figuring-out process caused me lots of angst, I have to say.  You know when you wake up in the morning and then are filled with dread because you remembered that last night you: wrecked your car, lost that important letter, said something hideously stupid at a party?  Well, I had that dread when I was in the midst of working on the quinoa salad situation.  Usually it’s not so dire, but I suppose it is homework, after all. And I’m a good little student.  A quinoa-wrappin’ kind of student.  What a huge relief to get that figured out.  Once the recipe is really, really finalized I’ll post it.

Today Chef KG showed us some snazzy ways to fabricate (as in, cut up) chicken.  We made various types of boneless chicken breast (”airline” and “supreme” and “frenched”), and we also learned how to remove the bone from a chicken leg.  For the grand finale, Chef showed us how to de-bone a chicken…without taking it apart.  Can you believe it? 

By the end of the demo, he had a large, chicken-meat rectangle, free of bones.  I was stunned by how easy he made it look.  With this meat slab, you can smooth it over with a filling and roll it up into a ballantine–when you slice the roll up, you get a spiral of chicken that includes both dark meat and light meat, as well as the filling.  So dreamy! I can’t believe that I’m going to be making those chicken rectangles…and soon.  Better get crackin’ (bones.  Sorry, vegetarians.  But I have a great wrap for you).

I learned today from Chef KG how a rice cooker is so smart.  Inside the cooker itself, right under where you put the bowl insert (where the rice goes), there is a flat disk that makes contact with the bottom of the bowl insert.  It senses the temperature of the insert itself.  When water is heated, it can only reach a certain temperature before it starts to boil, hence keeping the temperature at a level 212˚.  The boiling water keeps the temperature of the insert constant, as well. 

As the water begins to both evaporate and soak into the rice, there is no longer any water to keep the insert at around 212˚, so it starts to heat up.  The sensor notices this and switches from “cook” to “warm.”  Brilliant!  Much more brilliant than me, the packet-reading instruction follower.

Another tidbit I learned today:  Shiitake mushrooms–are silly.  Yes, that’s like saying salsa sauce.  Shiitake means “shii mushroom.”   This is the department of redundancy department ordering a pound of shii mushroom mushrooms, please, for the department. 

Tidbits taken care of now, I want to reflect on this, the first day of second quarter.  First I’m really seeing how we were coddled last quarter.  It was important to do that.  We needed to focus on knife skills.  We needed to get a sense of what the school was all about.  We needed to pass sanitation and math classes.  Now we’re really getting down to it.  No more Mr. Nice Chefs–although our main teacher, Chef KG, is wonderful.  He’ll push us to greatness with tough love, I hope, but he’s also really funny and personable. 

Second quarter’s first day brings a rumbling of approaching new experiences.  Makes me think of the roaring-train sound that Oklahoma tornadoes make when they’re heading your direction.  Throughout the day they told us everything we’ll be doing in the next 12 weeks.  It’s a lot to process.  Of course, once we get started, it will be one day at a time.  Nothing beyond what any of us can do. 

Even though I’m sure of my work ethic and my proudly earned organization skills, even though I think I know how to “hustle” in the kitchen fairly well, let’s face it.  I am nervous!  At least I’ve got these smarty-pants rice cookers on my side.

Want to try it?  Go to your cupboard and put a large of pinch of basil in a small bowl.  Stick your nose in there.  What do you smell?  What words come to mind?  Are you surprised at all?  I was.  I don’t even want to ruin it for you right now by planting ideas in your head, so if you feel like telling me what you smell (and taste!), please do!  I’d love to compare notes with you.  I felt like I knew basil so well, and yet I felt tonight like I was really smelling it for the first time, knowing that I would need to describe it.  And who takes a pinch of dried herbs and puts it in her mouth to eat, straight?  It’s just a different experience.

We were given several weeks to do this assignment, and I’m glad, because more than three or four of these experiences at one time can be overwhelming to the nose and palate.   

 The other day I decided to observe allspice during the same session as cloves, since the scent of allspice was reminding me so much of cloves.  Check that out!  If you have them both in your cupboard, wouldn’t it be fun to smell (and taste) the differences between the two, side by side?

I also did oregano and marjoram together, since they’re related yet so different.  Also, did you know that mace comes from the shell of nutmeg (and hence tastes a lot like it)? I did not know that before this assignment.

All in all, I feel like the assignment caused me to feel closer with each herb and spice in the chart, as if they were once acquaintances and now they’re good friends.  We’ve been through something together, and I’ve taken time to really get to know them a little better.  Now I feel more inclined to include each of these in my dishes, just like you’re more likely to trust your friend to help you rather than someone you just met.   Hey, fennel, can you help me out with some heavy lifting on this dish’s flavor?  I know you’re good at it.  Thanks, buddy.

Butternut Squash Arancini Stuffed with Pecorino Toscano

Unbelievable! I wrote this post on the evening of November 24.  I was looking for this recipe on my site and couldn’t find it…sure enough, there it was in “drafts” rather than “published.”  Was it that late at night when I wrote this?  Anyway, here is the post:

Arancini (risotto fritters),  translates from Italian as “little oranges,” since these little fried risotto balls do resemble oranges.  Arancini originated in Sicily and are usually filled with meat or tomato sauce, peas, or mozzarella. 

The Romans have a similar version of these croquettes, called Suppli al Telefono (which I believe translates to “telephone wires” or “on the phone”), which adorably refers to the strings of melted cheese that connect the two halves of the fritter when it is cut or bitten in half.   As the name indicates, Roman Suppli al Telefono are usually filled with cheese. 

These arancini are a non-traditional recipe, made with butternut squash risotto and stuffed with Pecorino Toscano, which is a creamy cheese.  I think a mild mozzarella would be fine as well.

Butternut Squash Arancini

Ingredients:

• One recipe of risotto (butternut squash or other kinds work as well), cooled
• 3 eggs
• 2 T milk
• 4 oz Pecorino Toscano (NOT Pecorino Romano. Choose a creamy cheese.  Mozzarella is fine)
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 2 cups dry bread crumbs
• 3 cups vegetable oil for frying

Directions:

1. Cube the cheese into 3/4 inch chunks.  In a small bowl, beat two eggs in with the milk.
2. Stir the third egg into the cooled risotto.  Roll 2 tablespoons’ worth of the risotto mixture in your hands, then with a finger, push a piece of cheese into the center of the ball.  Re-roll the ball around the cheese cube. 
3. Roll the ball into the flour, coating it lightly.  Drop the ball into the  egg mixture, then roll it in the bread crumbs.  Lay the ball on a cookie sheet or a piece of parchment or wax paper.  Make the rest of the balls, which will give a chance for the first balls to dry out slightly before frying. 
4. Slowly heat the oil in a medium, deep saucepan to 350˚.  The best temperature to do this is medium-low.  In small batches, fry the balls until they are evenly browned, turning them if necessary.  This will take several minutes.  Test the first ball to make sure you are happy with the interior–the cheese should be well-melted. 
5. When a fritter is finished, lay it on paper towels to absorb the extra oil. 
6. These arancini freeze well.  After frying them, lay them on a cookie sheet and put them in the freezer.  After they are well-frozen, seal them in a freezer bag.  To re-heat, place fritters on a cookie sheet in a 350˚ oven.  Bake for about 20 minutes.  Alternatively, you can freeze them before frying them as well.

Today marks the last day of NaBloWriMo, National Blog Writing Month.  I feel proud to say that I wrote 30 entries in a row (having learned about this only on November 2, I wrote two entries on the 2nd).  Somehow this doesn’t sound like a big number as I write it, but it was definitely a bit of a brain marathon.

Though the challenge was merely to get out there and post each day, I did make an effort not to just dump out whatever was on my mind, like a fat purse, willy-nilly. I was thinking about you and other people who might stumble upon this site and wanted to offer some kind of entertainment, information, or food for thought.   

If you have been reading in the last month, I hope you have felt entertained, informed, or fed, at least once!  It’s been a great challenge and learning experience, and if you keep a blog yourself, I hope you might consider doing it next year, too.  I’m going to do it again next November. 

I’d like to share another completely adorable tidbit from the book I mentioned last night, Food for the Hungry. 

This book has a chapter on “The Dinner Pail” (i.e., the lunchbox), and how to make lunches wonderful and exciting for your loved ones. Really, she’s targeting “the stomach of a tired man whose appetite has been dulled by mechanical, in-door toil.”  I wish I could share all of the fun and fanciful ideas she has for that lunchbox (is this woman a turn-of-the-century Martha Stewart, or did this stuff really happen???). 

However, I don’t want to wear out my welcome in your brain, so here’s just example of something fun from the chapter that  I actually plan to try, just to see how it turns out.  As you will see, it is right up any person’s  alley whose subliminal desire it is to make truffles out of everything.

Deviled Eggs (Turn of the Century Style!)

Partially quoted and borrowed from Food for the Hungry

1. Boil six eggs (hard).  Slice the eggs lengthwise and scoop out the yolks into a small bowl.  “Rub to a paste with a generous teaspoonful of butter.  Season with pepper, salt, and a suspicion of mustard.”
2. Mold the balls into spheres of their original size and fit the yolk back into a hollow half.  Line up the other half of the egg so that you have put the puzzle back together.  
3. “Roll each egg up in tissue paper, as you would a (get this–) bon-bon, twisting the paper at the ends.  If you wish to make the entree ornamental (of course you do! Who wouldn’t?), fringe the squares of paper before enveloping the eggs. 
4. You can  also make the yolks “yet more savory” if you add giblets & gravy to the yolks to moisten the paste. 

Serves 6 dinner pails?

Baby Spinach

Happy Thanksgiving!  Did you have pumpkin debates at your house, too?  Ours hit us by surprise.  World Championship Punkin Chunkin’ was on TV, and after a particularly good launch, some dude on the show commented, “Not bad for a vegetable.” 

“Except that a pumpkin’s a fruit,” I commented, probably smugly.

Mom protested with equal authority, “Except that it’s a vegetable.” 

“Pumpkins, squashes, cucumbers, watermelon.  All fruits,” I insisted.  “They blossom, they have seeds on the inside.  Fruits!  Oh yeah, by the way, did you know that strawberries aren’t really fruits? Their seeds are on the outside.  They’re in the rose family.” 

Now Mom’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, a look I recognize from the bluffs we try to pull on each other during Scrabble games, trying to sell fictional words with made-up definitions.  She informed me,  “The only reason I’m not checking this out right now is because I decided I wouldn’t use my computer on Thanksgiving…”   I was already opening up my laptop bag and getting online. 

Sure enough, I was right.  So was Mom. The ideal argument conclusion for a day of thanks.

Each time I’ve ever learned about another “vegetable” actually being a fruit–tomato, capsicum, eggplant, squash–I’ve gotten a mini thrill.  On a botanical level, they are considered fruits (and yes, the strawberry is botanically a “false fruit”). Knowing this feels like being in on a botany secret. 

However, as I picked up these nuggets of info, it didn’t occur to me that there’s not an equivalent ”vegetable” botanical category as with various fruits. Scientists do use the word vegetable to refer to plants, such as “vegetable matter.”   However, fruits and vegetables are not mutually exclusive.  So much for that mental game of Red Rover in which we sort out who’s who: “Oh, goody, spinach still gets to be on my side!  The veggies are ahead!  Oh well, you get beans.”  

The word “vegetable” is a culinary or cultural term.  Any edible plant or edible part of a plant can be considered a vegetable: leaves, roots, stems, flower buds, bulbs, and even fruits.   And, of course, since the term is culinary and cultural, that means people can come together to decide whether something’s a vegetable or not.  For example, in 1893 the US Supreme Court ruled the botanical fruit, tomato, to be a vegetable for taxation purposes.  Cultural vegetable, botanical fruit.   

 Well, now that that’s settled, I have to say: Punkin Chunkin’???  A World Championship for it?  This is the first day I’ve heard of it.  It’s a whole different area of food-related science I’ve been missing out on: physics.

Information Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/624564/vegetable#

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squash_(plant)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_culinary_vegetables

Butternut Squash Risotto Fritters with Lemon-Sage Sauce

I was probably about eight years old when I came up with a brilliant business scheme.   I made a cafeteria in my bedroom.  Using food from the cupboard, I made several different options to choose from.  The only dish I remember right now is the canned corn that had been heated up and buttered.  

Anyway, I set up a buffet in my bedroom, called it something profoundly creative like “Anne’s Cafeteria,” and–get this–invited my parents to dine there and charged them a market-standard fee to do so.  They thought this was hilarious.  Eventually I realized that they were laughing because I was charging them to eat food from their own cupboard.  I found it pretty funny, too, but I still charged them, and they still enjoyed a nice dinner.

However, this week I realized: Wait.  Isn’t that what catering is, really?  People buy food.  Then they pay you to cook it for them.  Sure, you’re usually responsible for going out to get the food for them yourself, but don’t you think if this eight-year-old had had the means to get to a grocery store (and up-front capital), she would go buy the canned corn for her in-house operation?  I think yes.   Does this mean I could tell a potential client that I’ve been catering since 1978?

Wild Mushroom Rolls with Gruyere and Fresh Thyme

In case I wasn’t sure earlier, it’s confirmed now: I love to cook for people.  Especially medium sized groups, like tonight.  Especially good people, like tonight.   It was a lovely party, and unfortunately I have hardly any pictures to show for it.  Too busy cooking and talking to those good people.

My favorite food moment of the night:  A woman dared someone to put a meatball onto the chicken salad in the crunchy cones, which he did…and proclaimed that it was delicious.  I was standing right there, so I popped a meatball onto one of those cones myself.  It never would have occured to me to put that Swedish-style meatball onto an Indian-curried salad with a sesame cone.  But you know, it wasn’t bad!  More importantly, they loved it and sent their friends back over to try it as well.  It thrills me that they were enjoying the food so much, and that the whimsical style of the appetizers made them want to experiment, too.

My incredible husband moment of the night: I had been so organized.  I had my inventory list, and I had checked everything off so diligently.  So how was it that I was standing in a clubhouse in Issaquah without the lemon bars?  No, this is not a joke, it is that elegant logic in the universe.  My new cuss word was the big mistake of the night. I called my incredible husband and asked him to bail me out.  He left work early.  He bussed home from downtown.  He asked our babysitter to watch Rosalie for awhile longer.  He drove from Ballard to Issaquah — which is a long drive — to bring me a pan of lemon bars.  I’m equal parts embarrassed to tell you that I did all of this (forgot them, then asked Mike to get them for me) and proud to tell you that Michael is my favorite husband on the planet.

All in all, the night was a great success. People loved the food, and my friend Taylor and I had fun serving it. 

By the way, if you’ve been reading lately and know about my recent thrilling acquisition of a chocolate tempering machine, I’ll tell you…  Nope,  I did not get a chance to dip the truffles for the party.  Holy cannoli, what a bummer.   But they were still marvelous tonight with the cocoa powder, almonds, and candied citrus peel. 

Sometime this weekend, though, I’m getting alone with that machine to finally dip things into perfectly tempered chocolate!  Who cares what it is?!!  Pizza? Legos?  Whatever!  I can’t wait!  Well, yes I can.  Apparently the burning obsession has limits.  It tends to fade out at around 1:00 in the morning, right along with the rest of me.  I hope you’re having sweet dreams as I write this.  I’m gonna go get some of that sweet dreamin’ too.