Splendidly, that’s how. Remember the story of the plague of locusts that descended on Egypt in the Old Testament book of Exodus? Well, the nicest-possible locusts (we’ll say a swarm and not a plague) pretty much vacuumed up the food that I and my helpers made for yesterday’s before-church breakfast to celebrate our once again meeting as a full church. It was fabulous!
So here’s what I did, and here’s the one glitch I had (which I still haven’t figured out completely)—
So . . . we’ve all been cooking solely for our families and pods, right? Last Friday night, though, Jim and I actually attended a dinner party. Woo-hoo! It was over at our church in what’s called the “Fireside Room,” which actually has a fireplace, and included just us and two other couples. The other four had all had COVID, so we felt pretty safe. I had volunteered to bring the main dish. It’s an easy choice to make something Italian and pasta-ish, and always good, but I wanted something a little different. I’ll give you the very basic item I came up with and then some ideas to jazz it up/change it up. One of the women asked for the recipe, which was flattering. When she, and you, see what I did you’ll probably laugh, but my idea worked really well. There are still some leftovers in the fridge as I type this Monday morning, and I’m looking forward to having some for lunch.
I mentioned last week that I had a head of Napa cabbage in the fridge (that’s the stuff in the lower right-hand corner of the picture) and was looking forward to having lots of salads with it, but after a few days it started tasting bitter. I couldn’t force it down. Then I thought, ‘I know! I’ll make that recipe from Smitten Kitchen again!’ But going back and looking at her post reminded me of how ridiculously complicated it is, with totally unnecessary steps. I’m not going to re-write the entire recipe, though.
This previous Saturday the Cherry Creek Chorale held the first of four special Saturday-morning rehearsals as we prepare for our October concert. To add a note of conviviality—and to encourage attendance—breakfast is traditionally served at 8:30 before we get to work at 9:00. It’s always hard to know how many attendees to plan for, as it seems to be the case that since Saturday counts as somewhat of a “makeup” rehearsal that can replace a regular one (and we’re supposed to miss no more than two regular rehearsals for any given concert), some people
For many years my family enjoyed something called “Chiquita’s Chicken,” a recipe we’d gotten from a magazine article by the redoubtable Peg Bracken, author of the I Hate To Cook Book. The article had a little booklet of recipes included which we apparently didn’t keep, although we did write down the one by Chiquita.. I remember that there was something called “Hao Nao Brown Kao” made with ground beef and vaguely Hawaiian or Chinese or some such, and another item called “Gloria’s Good Goulash.” I found HNBK on cooks.com but the other two are lost to posterity. (At least under their original names. Chiquita, whoever she may have been, apparently cribbed her recipe from an almost-identical one for “King Ranch Chicken,” which is very well known.) Since Chiquita’s Chicken relies heavily on canned soup, I looked for something a little more upscale to replace it and found the following. The cream of mushroom soup has been replaced by sour cream and cream cheese, so I guess that’s progress. The cream of chicken soup stayed. The original recipe called for the chicken and cream cheese to be rolled up in individual corn tortillas, something I refuse to do. Any time you’re asked for something that fiddly, just do layers instead. (There are quite a few other fiddly things I do, such as the individual mini-tart shells, but at least there’s some point to them.) So here’s my recipe, adapted from Taste of Home magazine.