Appetizers Archives - Respect Food Roles

Post-Partay Thoughts (And a Great Pistachio Cupcake Recipe)

March 9, 2020March 9, 2020 by Debi Simons

So . . . this past Friday, March 6, was the Irish concert by the Cherry Creek Chorale, a great, great occasion. And afterwards was the reception (which, thankfully, is held only after the Friday-night concert, not the Saturday-night one.) I made three items: my Spicy Cheddar Cookies, Guinness Brownies, and Pistachio Cupcakes. Follow the links to the first two recipes if you’re interested. And for the wonderful frosting I made, go here. I’m giving the recipe for the pistachio cupcakes below. For the Guinness Brownies I’m linking to the post over at Sally’s Baking Addiction. Note, though, that I ended up just using the white chocolate-cream cheese frosting linked to above for those as well as for the pistachio cupcakes. I had made a double batch of the frosting and realized that I had plenty for all of them. I

Reception Recipes–Mini Cupcakes and Savory Cookies

May 6, 2019 by Debi Simons

silver platter mounded with cheddar cookies — Not a great shot; I’ll hope to replace it after this week’s reception.

What’m I making for this Friday, the last post-concert reception for the year? I’m so glad you asked! We have a very spring-y theme: “April Showers Bring May Flowers,” and I’m so excited about making adorable little cupcakes plus some savory cookies. The sweet items will be very small, made in my mini-cupcake tins (of which I have six). I’m not going to worry too much about the sugar content of anything, and I do plan to sample some. They are going to be so cute! And people love my Cheddar cookies. I will have a visual and textural contrast to those with some pepper-Parmesan biscotti, an item I’ve made before that went over well.

Magnificent Homemade Savory Mini Quiches

March 20, 2019January 1, 2019 by Debi Simons

Once you master the rather finicky process of making the tart/mini quiche shells, you can make a wide array of little treats that will fit well into just about any party menu you can imagine, with either savory or sweet fillings. I’m giving my version of the crust recipe and then giving an all-purpose savory filling.

All-Purpose Crust Recipe for Mini Quiches and Tarts

I've been using some version of this crust for about 15 years, and over the years I've tweaked and fiddled and adjusted the basic recipe until I have something that works very well. Be sure you read the instructions and notes, as I've learned many lessons over the years!

Course Appetizer, Dessert

Keyword pastry shells, multiple fillings

Servings 24 mini shells

Author Debi Simons

Ingredients

4 oz. cream cheese or 1/2 of an 8-oz. pkg., softened
4 oz. butter or 1 stick, 8 tablespoons
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

Instructions

Mix ingredients together thoroughly. If you're making a multiple-recipe batch (which I highly recommend, as I don't think this recipe is worth making for just one batch) I'd advise using a stand mixer with the paddle.
Form the dough into a ball, wrap in plastic and refrigerate until firm.
Taking out about half of the dough from the fridge at a time, divide the dough into small balls, 1/2 ounce apiece (if you have a kitchen scale and want to use it) and press the dough into the wells of a 24-cup min-tart pan. It's not a bad idea, especially if you're going to be using a fruit-based filling, to use foil mini-muffin liners. Use of these liners will remove any possibility of sticking to the pan. Try to get a little rim of dough to stick up above the edge.
I’m afraid there’s no alternative to just using your thumbs—even Martha Stewart does it that way. (I do have a pastry tamper, and for the last few batches I used that first and then went back around with my thumbs, but I’m not sure I saved any time that way. I may try to refine my technique a bit the next time.)
If you're making the shells ahead of time, you can put the pans with the shells in the freezer, let them get hard, and then pop the shells out and put them on a baking sheet.

Savory Mini-Quiches

Servings 24

Author Debi Simons

Ingredients

Meat & cheese:

1/2-2/3 cup chopped ham or bacon
1/2-2/3 cup grated cheese of your choice

Savory Custard:

1/4 cup milk or half & half
1/8 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. pepper
a few gratings nutmeg

Instructions

Make the shells are instructed in the pastry recipe. Prick bottoms of shells with a fork. Bake at 350 for 15 minutes. The shells will puff up a bit, but that’s okay. You could drive yourself crazy with little squares of parchment in each one with a few pie weights . . . but I refuse to do that and the shells work fine.
Use a food processor to mix custard ingredients. (If you’re just making one batch you can use a mini-processor or the small bowl of your regular processor, or just whisk it in a bowl.) Put a small amount of cheese and ham in each muffin crust.
Put a tiny bit—probably a teaspoon—of the milk/egg mixture on top of each, trying not to let any of the mixture drip down the sides. You may need more custard; if so, just mix up another batch. Better to have too little than too much and have to figure out what to do with the extra. Bake for an additional 10 minutes, until cheese is melted and custard is set. Use an instant-read thermometer to test a quiche in the middle of the pan and the center of the quiche, making sure that temp is at least 160 degrees.

Recipe Notes

This recipe can be multiplied exponentially. I made 12x of this recipe for a wedding reception, filling up my six 24-cup mini-muffin pans twice, and I could have/should have made at least 96 more, filling up four of the pans for a third time. After pre-baking the shells for the first batch, I let them cool, popped them out using the point of a knife and lined them up on a large paper-towel-lined baking sheet, covered them with plastic wrap and froze them. When I was ready to bake them I used the muffin pans to bake all of them, baking six pans at a time, taking them out after they cooled briefly, then putting a new batch of shells back in the pans and doing them. In theory you could just bake the removed ones on the baking sheets, but I felt that the quiches would cook more evenly in the muffin pans. These were a huge hit; it’s just about impossible to make too many.

These can be served at room temp, although they shouldn’t be left out of the oven too long. They do have eggs, meat and cheese in them, after all. I did put layers of them in chafing dish pans, just so they were at least somewhat warm.

Featherlight, Ethereal, Non-Library-Paste Hummus

February 14, 2019August 8, 2018 by Debi Simons

Drizzled with olive oil, sprinkled with lemon pepper, smoked paprika, and cumin.

For years I’ve had a very basic hummus recipe–chickpeas from a can, lemon juice, tahini, garlic, olive oil and salt, all dumped into the food processor and whirled until pulverized. It was fine as an occasional lunch item, sometimes spread on a flour tortilla with some veggies and rolled up to make a wrap. I would also make it for occasions when I thought I absolutely had to serve some kind of appetizer, say if people were coming over to watch the Super Bowl. But it wasn’t something I ever got too excited about it. I liked it, but it wasn’t an obsession.

Simplified Layered Pesto-and-Tomato Spread

January 1, 2019November 5, 2015 by Debi Simons

elegant lunch plate I originally made a version of this recipe from my beloved Beat This cookbook, and while I really liked it there were some issues. For one thing, dear Ann Hodgman, the author, has you make your own pesto and then drain it in a sieve to get as much of the oil out as you can–so you put the oil in, and then you take the oil out. You can certainly buy pre-made pesto, as I do, but be sure you buy it from Costco or some such. Regular grocery stores sell it, but it comes in small jars with big prices. She called for sun-dried tomatoes for the tomato layer, but she specified that they be dry-packed, not oil-packed, which are hard to find. The tomatoes were to be diced and scattered across the cream-cheese layer, which meant that you wouldn’t necessarily get any tomato in a small dab on a cracker. It never occurred to me that I could make it any differently, so I made it Ann’s way and people really liked it. Later on I ran into the version I’m posting here. and because the layers all have some cream cheese in them and are mixed in a food processor they’re pretty smooth. Then, I realized that the sun-dried tomatoes aren’t really necessary because they’re going to get pureed anyway; you can just use tomato paste. What you really want is the color and the taste.

Debi’s Magic Green Sauce–The World’s Greatest Dip

March 9, 2024October 25, 2015 by Debi Simons

bowl of magic green sauce — image from https://pinchofyum.com/5-minute-magic-green-sauce

Debi’s Magic Green Sauce–The World’s Greatest Dip

If someone said to you that from now on you had just one choice for making a dip for a party, then you’d be obligated to choose this one. I have other really good dips on this website that your guests will like very much, but none that get swooned over quite as much as this one does. I get asked about it every time it shows up at a party or reception for which I’ve provided food. At a wedding reception I’d made a basinful of it, and at one point an aunt of the bride burst into the kitchen and said something like, “Who made that cilantro stuff?!” When I modestly cast down my eyes and said I had, she informed me that her husband was from Mexico and had loved it, saying it was very authentic. Which is pretty funny, as you’ll see below, since I got it from a Minnesota source.

I got the original recipe from a monster cooking blog called Pinch of Yum, where it was called “5-Minute Magic Green Sauce.” (Original in the sense of where I originally got it; there are other versions of this online although not, that I can see, with this exact mix of ingredients. Some just add pistachios to regular guacamole.) It is totally great, but let me say that this isn’t really a 5-minute recipe, with all due respect where respect is due. I do save quite a bit of time when I make it nowadays, though, by following the helpful hint about cilantro stems that I list in the recipe. I used to spend I don’t know how much time stripping the leaves from the cilantro stems. However, no matter how much time it takes, it is well worth making. When I made this the first time for a reception, people scarfed this down like you wouldn’t believe, and then stood around the bowl forlornly scraping out the last molecules with pita chips. I should have made at least a double recipe that time, and indeed I usually do so now. The recipe is really a combination of a type of pesto (the herb/oil/nut component) and guacamole (the avocado/jalapeno/lime component). Lindsay Ostrom, the original recipe’s author, says it can be used as a dip, spread or salad dressing depending on how thin you make it. It could work on a very sturdy salad with lots of crunchy ingredients and would be good on any kind of meat or fish as a sauce (my son tasted it and said, “This would be really good with beef”), with any raw vegetable as a dip, or with some type of neutral-flavored chip or cracker. In my version below I took out the water (which you could add back in if you want a dressing) and upped the avocado and the jalapeno.

Easy and Versatile Goat Cheese Spread

April 20, 2015 by Debi Simons

I made this for a women’s tea at my church and it was quite popular. It was also the easiest item on the menu. You can throw it together at the last minute and still get rave reviews.

Two Savory Cheesecakes

January 1, 2019November 3, 2014 by Debi Simons

a blue cheese and a savory herb cheesecake You know what they say: The reward for working hard is to be asked to do more work. In this case, though, the work was a pleasure and being asked to do it was a great compliment. A couple from the Chorale, Barb and John Wollan, asked me if I would be willing to do the reception for the small (ha!) recital that they were planning to give. They’d pay me. Oh no, I said. Being paid makes things very complicated. I’m happy to do it. So above you can see the results. I had been assured that the number attending would be 100 at the very most. Well, there were at least 150, so I’m afraid that I spent much of the performance worrying that there wouldn’t be enough food. It ended up fine, though. We even ended up with a whole gallon of leftover cider.