Tapas feast

There has been a lot of talk about Spain in the house recently, as Z and the parents spent some time there in the spring. There has also been a lot of talk about food, as I cannot stop obsessing about cooking and baking and all around foodie stuff. So one night someone suggested we have a potluck tapas night, each of us prepare two savories and a sweet. So we did. There was a great and fantastic feast.

 Kebabs with only vegetables. I brushed a sauce made from a packet on. We don't have a barbeque, so I placed the skewers on a baking pan, whose edges were just the right distance for the food to hang in between.

 Same kebabs, only with chicken also. Some of the chicken went upstairs to Sam later. She was a HAPPY KITTY after that.

 I don't have a lot of experience with pastry. I can't recall having made a lot in my life but I do think I made a pie earlier this year. Well, this is a shortening pastry, which was not very interesting. My big plan was to make lime cheesecake in the pastries. It was a good idea, but I'm pretty sure I have never made a cheesecake before and one thing I learned for certain: you can't just wing it with cheesecake. Later I discovered I needed way more cream cheese than I had (three bricks instead of one) and I needed sweetened condensed milk. So, while tasty, they aren't exactly cheesecakes. We've been calling them 'lime tarts'.

 This was fun. Salad rolls. I took a head of lettuce and washed & dried the leaves. Once I got them to a uniform size, I took thin slices of carrot and green onion, bean sprouts, some mung bean vermicelli (Z called them 'glass noodles') and a few peanuts, put them in the lettuce leaf. The sauce to accompany them is somewhere below.

 Kale chips! Sister S made these. She baked some kale and collard greens after seasoning them, and they were so extremely tasty that they were the first to go.

 O shoot. I forget what this is. Spanish potato salad? Russian potato salad? S made this too.

 O hello. Olives and feta. Pure decadence! Made by Z.

 I'm totally going to botch this reference because I wasn't familiar with it. S made ham and jam on crackers as a tribute to so-and-so the something something mouse from a children's story they (three siblings) all knew about.

 The sauces. Basically they are the same thing: raw garlic & ginger, sesame oil, rice vinegar, soy sauce. The one in the back also has peanut butter. The close one was for the salad rolls, the far one was for the kebabs. Normally I would have added sweet chili sauce too, but we didn't have any and it wasn't missed.

 Spinach and garbanzo beans with a lot of olive oil. There are only two ramekins in the house so Z used a mason jar. We are on a bit of a mason jar kick, with wanting to use mason jars as vessels for cooking and serving food in.

 

O dear! Here I am realizing that I missed two of Thor's offerings. Featured above is hard boiled eggs in a bowl of onion peel on a piece of bread. Atop the egg is paprika and caramelized onions. Aside from the raw onion, I really enjoyed this. Thor also made this very interesting... what to call it? A quarter of a large tortilla held some banana fried in curry spices. It was delicious. Thor also fried up an avocado in butter, sugar, bourbon and a a cinnamon stick. 

Also missing (see by the end I was on my third glass of wine so...) was the finishing chocolate. I'm going to mangle this name too - ciocollato de calde? Basically a thick hot chocolate that was like a warm pudding. Z made one with caramel, one with chili, one with citrus sugar and one with vanilla. I think I got the citrus sugar one, though it was so mild I couldn't taste it. But Yum it was. 

I really enjoy mealtimes with this family. I've been a part of it now for nearly five years and I'm still getting used to all the singing. :-) I loved being able to serve raw garlic and ginger and nobody batted an eyelash. I loved all the experimenting with food. It was great having leftovers. Yeah, we had a great time on Saturday.