Its Time to Think About Christmas!

Please don't throw things at me for putting it out there! You know I'm right. If there is any time of year that can benefit with just a tiny bit of planning it is the whole Christmas thing so I am beginning this weekend. Besides, if I don't start now, before I realize it I will be caught up in Thanksgiving and staring down a Christmas rush after I'm done digesting turkey.

So how do I start? I usually start with a simple Excel spreadsheet. I try to get everything I need to do for Christmas on one sheet. I start by sorting through what gifts I might already have stored away in the garage. Yes, I'm one of those assholes who actually shops for Christmas during the year. This Excel sheet also serves another purpose: Now that I have Christmas on the brain I will need a place to brainstorm and put the gift ideas that pop into my head. I find that its not really that hard to come up with good gift ideas for family and friends if you have been listening all year. What is hard, however, is remembering what the heck they are when the pressure is on and its time to shop. Excel sheets can hold your thoughts for when you are ready to act. Just copy all your paper notes, shopping links, etc. when you get to your computer each night during the season . Better yet, upload a copy to Google Docs or save it to your PDA, so you can add to it wherever you are. When I'm ready to shop and get down to it, I just go to this sheet to see what I need to do.

The rest of the sheet is a glorified to do list. Do I need to buy Christmas cards and wrapping paper? Will we be throwing a party? If so, its time to pick a night. Just get it on the sheet so you know what you are up against.

Anatomy of a Dinner Party: The Main Course

To my way of thinking there is no better dish to have in your arsenal than roasted rack of lamb. Its the complete foolproof ease with which it can be prepared and the instant cache it adds to the occasion you serve it make the extra expense completely worth it. One rack makes an elegant dinner for two, two racks a dinner party for four and half a dozen racks makes a buffet entre or even a great "appetizer" for those appetizer events that are really dinner parties in disguise. (Academy awards party anyone?) I usually get my racks at Costco as they are reasonably priced and always good. When its just me and my man I will often just skip this step but for some reason guests always seem impressed when I do it. If you do, don't get intimidated! I only do a very rough job of it as the hot oven will correct any aesthetic issues you might be afraid of. Do make sure that between the ribs has been cracked so you can slice easily after cooking. Think '2 people per rack' when planning unless the rest of the meal is real large and even then you will want a few leftover chops for yourself the next day.

Here's the rub:

2 TBS Vegetable Oil
4 teasp whole grain mustard
1 teasp dried rosemary, crushed
1/2 teasp kosher salt
1/2 teasp black pepper

Coat rack with oil rub and then coat the rack with cracker or bread crumbs. Put racks into a pan and cover the bones with some tin foil. You can see in my picture below what happens if a bone is not covered! Sizzle!


Thanks to my devotion to Barbara Kafka I roast in a 500 degree oven. If the rack is at room temperature and the oven is blazing at 500 degress you will roast exactly for 20 minutes. Pull from oven and let sit 5 minutes minimum. Cut and serve. If you don't trust me on that, use a thermometer and roast until it read 138 degrees for a nice medium rare chop. The chops will continue cooking after you take them out and will reabsorb the juices. This is a critical step that also gives you more time to put on the final touches for other dishes or reheat your oven dishes before serving.

Taking a CSA Break But Still Cooking Organic!

Yesterday was the last basket of my current CSA share commitment. 14 weeks since the first basket arrived! It was my intention to switch our 'subscription' to an every OTHER week program to reduce the pressure of using all the produce in one week, be a bit more pragmatic with the expense, and still carry on our support of the CSA concept. Morning Song Farms disallows vacation skips when you go every other week and I have a lot of travel scheduled this month and through the end of the year. As such, I will use this time to reflect on the experience and make my decision as to whether or not we will continue when the dust settles. I hope to post a bit on a trip or two to a local farmer's market and compare the two organic experiences.

Despite the lack of posts, I think the others here are still going strong with their CSA boxes. Hopefully they will continue to share as well.

In the meantime, I still have lots of zucchini from Morning Song Farm! That's just fine with me as its always been a favorite. Several pieces went into this dish I made for a dinner party last weekend, Vegetable Tian. Its a great baked veggie dish that only uses a little gruyere so it remains a healthy oven dish for a buffet.

I've copied the recipe after the jump but you can get both this and other recipes, as well as a full report on the menu here.


Vegetable Tian:

Adapted from Ina Garten, "Barefoot in Paris".

Ingredients

* Good olive oil
* 2 large yellow onions, cut in half and sliced
* 2 garlic cloves, minced
* 3/4 pound yellow squas, yellow zucchini.
* 3/4 pound zucchini
* 1 1/4 pounds medium tomatoes
* 1 teaspoon kosher salt
* 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
* 1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves, plus extra sprigs
* 2 ounces Gruyere cheese, grated

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Brush a 9 by 13 by 2-inch baking dish with olive oil. In a medium saute pan, heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil and cook the onions over medium-low heat for 8 to 10 minutes, until translucent. Add the garlic and cook for another minute. Spread the onion mixture on the bottom of the baking dish.

Slice the potatoes, zucchini, and tomatoes in 1/4-inch thick slices. Layer them alternately in the dish on top of the onions, fitting them tightly, making only 1 layer. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, thyme leaves, and thyme sprigs and drizzle with 1 more tablespoon of olive oil. Cover the dish with aluminum foil and bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until the potatoes are tender. Uncover the dish, remove the thyme sprigs, sprinkle the cheese on top, and bake for another 30 minutes until browned. Serve warm.

Anatomy of a Dinner Party: Buffet for 12

My blog vacation now comes to an end. "He just started! He took a vacation!?" My office sent me overseas for a bit. Who was I to say 'no'? Upon my return my husband and I celebrated our first legal wedding anniversary with an out of town trip. Then, after rushing back home, we were committed to throwing a long-planned dinner party for 12 just a couple days later. Now I love cooking and throwing dinner parties. Truthfully to my way of thinking, on party night serving 12 for dinner and serving 4 for dinner aren't all that much different in terms of workload. It is the planning and preparation for a large group that seems to take a bit more time and effort. Perhaps that is also my upbringing. I come from a small family where our weekly "family meal" was just 5 people. My husband's family meal is 14! Still for me it is about the planning and not the cooking where I find the extra work. As for choosing the menu? In our house a party of 12 means its going to be a buffet so that narrows down the food choices a bit. Thankfully I have a bunch of 'go to' recipes for such an occasion! Grab your plate and sit where you like!

I have been meaning for some time to blog about the great productivity tips and software applications I've been experimenting with. Personal productivity has been a big topic for me lately given my recent schedule (see above). That will have to wait a post or two because for party planning I still go the old fashioned route: I just make a list. Because I am a geek I HAVE played around with lots of list making software packages. (There is even one web utilities that will read your recipes and tell YOU what to buy and what you need to do for a party.) More on that stuff later. For this task, however, I prefer the simple tech method of just typing up a Microsoft Word Document. Everything has to fit on one page.

Creating your own list in a work processor, thinking through the party and the various cooking chores helps me flush out my thoughts the menu and what I might need to shop for. (Also, I can email it to myself at work to work on later or to my husband at his work if I need him to do the shopping!) Above is my actual list from the party. You can see how I made some changes after putting my thoughts down on paper. (Or rather, on screen.) The guests were all good friends and colleagues of my husband's and he was very interested that everything be 'just right'. Having this list was a good way to communicate with him what I had planned for his friends that evening.

For me this kind of a meal will always rely heavily on the oven so I'm glad it was fall. To my way of thinking, Fall definitely lends itself to oven cooking, don't you think? Also, with this many people in our small house I prefer not to be tending to lots of food on the stove or running back and forth from the grill to the kitchen. I had made all these dishes previously so that went a long way to lowering the stress level. I'll experiment for 4-6 people but not 12-16. Also nice here is that the cooking work on this menu is carried out before the party starts. Come party time, the most you are doing is putting things in and out of ovens.

My friend Cindy recently blogged about her experiences making the Sagaponic Corn Pudding I am so fond of. I'll link to her version of this favorite Ina Garten recipe because, like Cindy, I also cut back on the butter and sugar Ina calls for in her book. (Why do I end up doing that on so many of Ina's recipes?) You can't tell by looking at it can you? Nobody who tasted it seemed to mind! I also make the full version of this recipe in one dish instead of two. I just think it cooks better that way.


Since I was on an "Ina Garten Roll" I also made her "Vegetable Tian" that was in her Paris book that my friend Steve gave me. (Steve is a great friend who actually turned me onto Ina years ago. He does a mean impression of her too!) Its a great dish to have with meats when you want something simple to serve with a meat entre and nothing else on the plate. My version subs the potato with yellow squash or yellow zucchini to keep the color thing going. I already had corn on the plate so didn't need anymore startches. The pictures just don't do this one justice and no matter how much I make for any given party, its always all gone by the end of the evening. Save some prep time on this one by making the onions up to a day in advance and keep in an airtight container in the refrigerator until you are ready to assemble.

Vegetable Tian:

Adapted from Ina Garten, "Barefoot in Paris".

Ingredients

nocoupons

• Good olive oil
• 2 large yellow onions, cut in half and sliced
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 3/4 pound yellow squas, yellow zucchini.
• 3/4 pound zucchini
• 1 1/4 pounds medium tomatoes
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves, plus extra sprigs
• 2 ounces Gruyere cheese, grated

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Brush a 9 by 13 by 2-inch baking dish with olive oil. In a medium saute pan, heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil and cook the onions over medium-low heat for 8 to 10 minutes, until translucent. Add the garlic and cook for another minute. Spread the onion mixture on the bottom of the baking dish.

Slice the two kinds of zucchini and the tomatoes in 1/4-inch thick slices. Layer them alternately in the dish on top of the onions, fitting them tightly, making only 1 layer. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, thyme leaves, and thyme sprigs and drizzle with 1 more tablespoon of olive oil. Cover the dish with aluminum foil and bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until the potatoes are tender. Uncover the dish, remove the thyme sprigs, sprinkle the cheese on top, and bake for another 30 minutes until browned. Serve warm.

What about the main course you ask? I'll continue with that in the next post.

What are your 'go to' dishes for a buffet dinner party?

Catching the Google Wave

Thanks to my friend Dan I received an invitation to try out Google's Wave. I blogged here about it earlier and linked to a video that explained what this new communication medium is about. It was pretty long but quite fascinating to geeks like me. Check out this much simpler version that explains the most basic part The Wave:



Note: I do have a few invitations left to send if any commenter wants to try it out.