Party Food Archives - Page 3 of 4

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.

A Set of Sweet Mini Tart Variations

February 6, 2023July 23, 2018 by Debi Simons

Over the years I’ve developed several recipes for mini tarts that use the same easy dough for the crust. They’re kind of labor-intensive, but in the end you have adorable, single-serving treats that are prettier and more interesting than most cookies but can still be picked up and eaten without a plate or fork.

First take a look at the crust recipe, which is the same as for the savory mini-quiches. This dough recipe pops up all over the place, and it’s just great. You may think that it has too much cream cheese/butter in relation to the amount of flour, but it doesn’t. I have made a minor tweak to the amounts as originally written, since that recipe called for 3 ounces of cream cheese, a size that used to be sold individually, and therefore upped the flour a bit. These new amounts give you a slightly larger amount of dough to work with.

Strawberry Cheesecake Cupcake Extravaganza

January 1, 2019March 22, 2017 by Debi Simons

Strawberry muffins on cupcake stand My dear friend Cindy took a picture of the final product under less-than-optimum circumstances in the low light of the wedding reception. Thank you, Cindy! As usual I wasn’t prepared to take pictures and had left my camera in the car.

I made these for the daughter of a dear friend, and I have to say that they were very successful. Every single one of the 96 I made disappeared, and I got lots of compliments. Can’t recommend them highly enough. They’re not very hard and can be made in advance and frozen excluding the strawberries and glaze. The actual filling is a very basic plain cheesecake mixture; the toppings make them special. You can do even more with decorating them if you want to.

Easy, Rich Chocolate Cupcakes

April 11, 2016 by Debi Simons

rich chocolate cupcakes

Pretty nice-looking cupcake, isn’t it? Beautifully domed, perfectly sized for the muffin tin cup. And the inside was moist and delicious, in spite of the fact that I overbaked it a bit. (Note to self: Be sure to use the oven timer that measures minutes and seconds, not hours and minutes, when baking something that requires minutes. If I hadn’t realized at about the 20-minute mark that I’d set the wrong timer, the above would be a picture of a lump of chocolate coal. As it was, they probably baked about five minutes more than necessary.) I did frost these with an unbelievably delicious chocolate buttercream, but I’ll be discussing that recipe in a later post.

Below are are two comparison shots of the cupcakes this week and the ones last week.

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.

Pear Crumb Pie

June 13, 2019September 22, 2015 by Debi Simons

pear crumb pie I’m not indulging in many desserts these days, but this one isn’t all that sugar-heavy, clocking in at 1 cup of sugar for the entire recipe. That’s 2 tablespoons of sugar per serving if you cut the pie into 8 slices, or 24 grams total. The goal is to keep daily added sugar consumption below 25 grams, or 100 calories. So you could have a regular-size slice and not go over your allowance for the day, as long as that’s all the added sugar you eat! Ice cream or sweetened whipped cream would be out as toppings, but unsweetened cream, whipped or unwhipped, would be fine.

To access the recipe, follow this link:

“Pear Crumb Pie“

A Couple of Unusual Brownie Recipes

May 20, 2015 by Debi Simons

plate of mexican brownies plat of mom Brownies, or some kind of simple bar cookie, are a great asset to have in your recipe box. You can pull them out, whip them up, and get them to the potluck or party in reasonably short order. You probably have a simple chocolate brownie recipe that you use; these two are a little off the beaten track. I’ve always had good success with them.

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.