A Night of Pasta (and Sauces)

Not that I was expecting a disaster or anything, but fresh pasta was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I'll save more commentary on that for the fresh pasta blog entry. However, just wanted to get it out there - all you whiners about fresh pasta taking forever - no it doesn't! At least it doesn't if you use a handy dandy KitchenAid stand mixer pasta roller/cutter attachment. Jeebus, that is one sweet set to have around the kitchen.

Aside from my awe with the stand mixer attachment, I was also tickled to see how all nine of us were able to swarm in a happy chaotic mess around the tiny kitchen of our apartment and yet still manage to create such deliciousness in the form of three different pasta sauces and fresh pasta noodles. (Trang, bless her heart, worked on the bruschetta and tiramisu ahead of time.)

Anyway, it sure was a fun Dinner Meet - thanks ever so much for hosting, Trang!

Dinner Meet with the Chongs

Another delicious Dinner Meet to add to the tally! This evening, nine of us gathered at the Chong residence to prepare some deliciously cheesy eats. I'll be updating the blog soon with pictures and recipes from the evening. The menu consisted of the following:

- Spinach and Artichoke Dip

- Blue Cheese Deviled Eggs

- Broccoli and Cheese Stuffed Chicken Breasts

Thanks for having us over, Hamilton and Sanders. Fantastic job on the Dinner Meet! :)

Candace's Chinese Favorites

We had a great time last week making a couple of Candace's Chinese favorites. The fare was delicious, and the recipes were easy to follow. I liked that we were a small group of five; two people had to cancel at the last minute. There was less sitting around and more cooking time distributed among the attendees. I also felt like we got a lot more of the social aspect I was hoping for when I first conceived the idea for Dinner Meet. We had great conversation flowing throughout dinner and post-dinner, and before we knew it, it was time to go home and ready ourselves for another workday. Thanks, Candace, for hosting a fantastic Dinner Meet!

Oodles of Noodles

Indeed, we feasted on noodles, noodles, and more noodles at Dinner Meet this week, and boy, were they tasty! These are all noodle dishes that are easy to prepare for dinner on a weeknight, so I hope you try them out. Since I've prepared these dishes before, I felt more confident about how they would turn out. (Though trying out completely new recipes with a group of people for the first time can be amusing as well, I'm sure. I guess that's how quite a few of these Dinner Meets have been in the past few weeks, and the dishes turned out great!) Anyway, check out the recipes, and let me know how they turn out.

Italian Night = Tomato Night

Last night's Dinner Meet was tasty, but I think we may have gone overboard with the tomato usage. We managed to use tomato in every single course except for the biscotti. Don't get me wrong, I love tomatoes, but this might be the most tomato I've had in the last month! The recipes were fairly easy to prepare, though some of the boys encountered issues following the directions for biscotti. (The biscotti still turned out well, so maybe there is a method to their madness!)

Thanks, Mike, for hosting, and for letting us use up all of the tomatoes you grew in your garden. I swear, the dishes tasted so much better with the fresh tomatoes!

Southern Comfort - yum yum good!

This was some seriously good grub. Or, as Alton Brown (one of my superheroes on the Food Network) would probably say, "That's some Good Eats!" The color contrasts, the bold flavors of the dishes, and the warmth that envelops you purely from the feast of good, ol' comfort food all contributed to my delight with last night's Dinner Meet. I highly recommend you try making these dishes together - Alice did a fantastic job of pairing these recipes to create a memorable meal. She got these recipes from Epicurious (I'm not sure if she tweaked any of it), but I've heard from reputable sources that the site is a treasure trove of yummy recipes. I'll have to check it out sometime.

Thanks again for the delicious meal, Alice!

Indian Deliciousness!

Thanks to Bhumi for hosting such a wonderful night of Indian cooking! I've always been intimidated by the list of ingredients needed for Indian dishes, so I have never mustered the courage to attempt an Indian dish on my own. Seeing Bhumi at work made me realize it's not so bad; you just need to have the right ingredients on hand, and then it's just a matter of adjusting the taste with a pinch of this and a dash of that. All of the recipes for this week include ingredients that can be picked up at your neighborhood Indian grocery store, and luckily, Sunnyvale does not lack in this area. :)

Hope you all have a chance to try out the recipes from our Indian Dinner Meet - they were truly delicious!

Taste of Vietnam

Yum, yum, yum! We had a delicious meal the other night at our place - what a feast! Trang led our merry group of Dinner Meeters in creating an elaborate Vietnamese feast, consisting of the following dishes:

Vietnamese Chicken Noodle Soup
Lemon Chicken Skewers
Roasted Fish Wrapped in Spring Rolls, with Peanut Sauce
Sweet Corn and Rice Pudding

We all stuffed ourselves silly - I, for one, had a difficult time falling asleep that night since I was so full! Out of the dishes we created, I would say that the soup and chicken skewers are easiest to reproduce in a novice kitchen. (Though we almost made an unforgivable error on the skewers when salt was mistaken for sugar!) The fish takes a bit more work, though we definitely took the shortcut and brought home fried fish from Ranch 99 (or 99 Ranch, as some prefer to call it). Anyway, let me know if you try any of these recipes. I'd love to hear how it goes. :)

Thanks, Trang, for hosting a wonderful Dinner Meet!

"New Asian" Cuisine

This week, we were at Walter's to cook some of his favorite dishes. He had already made a batch of the Braised Beef Short Ribs with Baby Carrots ahead of time since that dish required a few more hours on the stove than the others, but some of us did get to start up another batch just to try out the "recipe". (I put that in quotes since Walter actually didn't have recipes on hand at the time, and we were really just asking him for instructions with each step. He gave them to me post dinner though, so I'll be posting those shortly!) The Pan-Seared Salmon Fillets with Garlic and Basil were surprisingly easy to prepare, and we may have put a bit more peppercorn than was necessary into the Napa Cabbage with Sichuan Peppercorn dish - as it was being stir-fried, most of us started sneezing! :-) For dessert, we made Almond Rochers from the Tartine recipe book - they were delicious!

Thanks for coming, everyone. It was great meeting up with some people I hadn't seen in more than 5 years, people I hadn't met before, and people I've seen more regularly. What an awesome mix of people for the Dinner Meet! Hope everyone had a great time, and I'll look forward to seeing you at the next one! Also, a big thank you to Walter for hosting!

Thai Night - success!

Our first Dinner Meet took place last night, and it was a success! Yummy food, great company - I hate to be cliché, but what more can you ask for?

On the menu was Thai food, featuring

- Green chicken curry

- Pork laab

- Pad see ew

- Mango with coconut sticky rice

I'll update the blog in the next day or two with individual blog posts of the recipes. We made a few modifications to the recipes since we were cooking for eight, so I'll need to update the recipes to include those. Also, what I love about Thai recipes is that they are very forgiving in terms of actual ingredient amounts that you include; really, it's all about adjusting the taste to suit your preferences by putting more (or less) of preferred flavors into the dish. Hopefully, the recipes I'm including here will give you a great starting foundation for creating these dishes in your home. :)

The evening started off a bit hectic, especially since I got home barely ten minutes before my first guest arrived. (Work's been super crazy this week!) As people arrived, I pointed them to the recipes, and off they went - chopping, stirring, tasting, until we finally had ourselves a nice mid-week feast to consume at the dinner table. Everything tasted great, but I think the most enjoyable part was, of course, the company.

Thanks for coming out, everyone, and I hope to see you for dinner again soon!