The Dinner Party

Ah, entertaining! We don't do it often enough. When we do, we tend to go a wee bit overboard, so the idea of doing it regularly is a tad overwhelming. Invariably, I forget to bring in the cucumber salad. This time I remembered the salad, but forgot the cookies. My beautiful, beautiful cookies. 

The efforts came out (mostly) so pretty I had to take pictures. 

Ma's pan-cooked salmon, which is how she makes it every week for Shabbos. It was served with a dip composed of mayo, dried dill, and a few cloves of roasted garlic, as well as the almost forgotten cucumber salad and my niece's favorite, tomato salad. 

This one you know already, the Spanish eggplant dip. It was brought out together with the fish, then lingered on the table all night long.

Chicken soup, of course. It's a basic tenet of the faith.

The veal chops were a success, despite being accidentally over-simmered. (The trick is that fish should err on the side of undercooked, while meat can braise away.) It was made by hobbling together a few googled recipes for "pan-cooked veal chops with mushrooms"—by us, meat doesn't get put into the oven unless absolutely necessary. 

For our heimishe guests, out came the old country: kaposztás tészta (cabbage and noodles). However, my local store did not have—gasp—the large square egg lukshen that is tészta (Manischewitz definitely makes 'em), so bow ties were used instead. (Mind, if it wasn't for company, I would have reached for the whole-wheat pasta.)

The other main was my new, improved love, stuffed pepper (töltött paprika). It's so photogenic, I don't know which shot came out pepper—I mean better. Aren't they gorgeous? Or is it just me?

This ended up being more for me than for the guests, but I didn't mind. It was a pleasure to eat it.

Other sides that I neglected to photograph were pan-roasted vegetables (carrots, parsnip, and Brussels sprouts), cauliflower kugel (which stays so stubbornly bland I ended up chucking in nutritional yeast and a head of roasted garlic for flavor, and it totally worked), oven-roasted beets that no one ate (although they were so amazingly sweet! Without any sweetener added!), sautéed sugar snap peas with shallots and sun-dried tomato. 

Dessert was the forgotten cookies, macadamia nuts (the KING of the nuts!), brownie topped with cashew cream (also hammered together from a multitude of recipes). 

Yeah, we totally made too much. No worries, we lived on it for the next week and change.