A pleasant surprise

It’s been awhile since I’ve done any catering, but last night ended the drought. My friend Angie asked me to help with a surprise 40^th birthday party she was planning for a girlfriend. Eager to get my catering skills back up to snuff, I readily accepted.

The plan was hors d’oeuvres for 25-30 people. Cool, easy enough. Then Angie threw me the curveball. The birthday girl doesn’t eat red meat, chicken, pork, nuts or cheese. Omitting the meat wasn’t too much of a problem, but I don’t think I’ve ever put out a party spread that didn’t contain cheese and nuts. I turned on my brain and got down to recipe browsing.

Once I got my head wrapped around the menu constraints, coming up with ideas wasn’t as challenging as I feared it might be. Vegetables and fruit were fair game, of course, and the possibilities there were endless. So were crackers, dips and spreads, as long as they didn’t contain dairy. And seafood was allowable. Birthday cake for dessert was already taken care of.

So here’s what I came up with:

the spread

First, instead of a standard run-of-the-mill veggie platter, I decided to take a note from Black Market and assemble a variety of fresh pickles. I picked five items  to pickle and used different recipes for each to provide plenty of flavor variety. I’d made the pickled grapes and the lemon pickled zucchini before, but the dill green beans, Asian carrots and icebox pickles were all new experiments, and ones that worked out great. I prepared the green beans, carrots and grapes the night before so they’d have plenty of time to marinate, and then banged out the cucumbers the morning of and the zucchini at the last minute (I knew from experience that these don’t take long to soak up the juice).

a fine pickle

Hubby and I pulled all the pickles out of the fridge for a mid-afternoon taste test to make sure things were on track. And boy, were they! The carrots took on an awesome soy ginger tang and the cucumbers were spicy sweet thanks to the pickling spice I used. The green beans were my favorite – crunchy crisp and packed with bracing fresh dill and puckery vinegar. Yay! I breathed a sigh of relief and turned my attention to the rest of the menu.

wine-baked olives

Wine-baked olives were something that I immediately pulled out of my recipe box for consideration. Easy peasy and elegant. The only tricky part is boiling the olives briefly at first to soften slightly and leech out some of the excess oil. Then you simply drain them, throw them into a casserole dish and pour in a little red wine. Sprinkle in some fresh thyme and grate over a little orange zest, then bake for 30 minutes and there ya go. One gentleman at the party said they were the best olives he’d ever eaten. Thank you, kind sir!

California shrimp cocktail with orange and avocado

Shrimp cocktail was one of the first things that leapt to mind, and I have a great recipe from my catering mentor Jen that I’ve made a couple times before. A California spin adds in sliced avocado and orange sections over mixed greens. Served individually in little cups, they look attractive and taste great. And as Angie’s husband Ben so aptly noted, avocado is like bacon for vegetarians.

spicy roasted chickpeas

Figuring we needed a little something crunchy to go with the drinks, I toasted up a big batch of spicy chickpeas instead of setting out a bowl of hummus like I’d originally intended. Drain the garbanzos, then toss with olive oil and a spice blend of your choosing (I used cumin, thyme, garlic salt, pepper and cayenne), then bake on a cookie sheet until crunchy. These little babies are great to have on hand in lieu of nuts or chips, and totally threw some of the party guests for a pleasant loop when they bit in.

I rounded out the mix with crackers, toasted pita wedges and a yummy roasted eggplant dip recipe from Ina Garten. Ina never steers you wrong.

All in all, the birthday girl was surprised, the party was a success and I got lots of great feedback. Nice to know I’ve still got it.

A cheesy proposition

When hubby and I lived in Sonoma, California the year after we got married, one of our favorite things to do was to pick up a random bottle of vino from one of the local wineries and assemble a cheese board for supper. In fact, we enjoyed this whole ritual so much, we did it on a weekly basis. In California wine country, every restaurant, grocery store, corner deli and gas station (no joke) offered spectacular wine and cheese selections. Creating something incredibly delicious without even turning on the oven was a total no-brainer.

One of the more memorable cheese platters that comes to mind from that era in my life was something we enjoyed with another couple, kicking off a night out at the swanky Ledson Hotel restaurant on the Sonoma town square. I don’t recall specifics, but I have a fond fuzzy memory of fragrant, fruity red wine complemented by salty, robust blue cheese smeared on small squares of housemade walnut bread and topped with paper-thin slices of sweet, juicy pear. It was a thing of beauty. I have no idea where we went for dinner or what we ate the rest of the night, but the memory of that blue cheese and walnut bread is etched in my brain forever.

Sadly, our cheese board habit has gone the way of the dinosaurs since moving back to Indianapolis. Every now and then, we’ll get a hankering for it, but these times are few and far between. Out of sight, out of mind I suppose. I’m not even sure where to go here in town for great cheese. Valentine’s Day, we decided, marked a perfect occasion to bring our long-lost tradition back to life.

In the past, our cheese board dinners and party platter offerings have consisted of fairly standard ingredients. Two or three cheeses, water crackers or slices of baguette, nuts, olives, grapes, perhaps a sliced apple. Maybe some salumi if we’re feeling wild and crazy. That’s about it.

From what I’ve gleaned in my culinary research over the years, the general rule of thumb for cheese platters is as follows — one hard, one soft, one blue. Which breaks down into a cheddar/gouda/havarti, a brie/goat, and a gorgonzola/blue. No rocket science about it. It’s what you choose to accent the cheese that really makes the difference.

Presentation is key when it comes to cheese platters, as it is for any plate you want to appear impressive. The saying “you eat first with your eyes” is definitely true. A few extra minutes can make any item you serve so much more appealing. Stack things up in little piles. Slice your vegetables and fruits with care. Set out a couple of cute cheese slicers or cocktail spoons for serving. Include some fresh herbs for garnish. The little details count big here.

I clipped a gorgeous two-page spread from a magazine (I believe it was Bon Appetit) several months ago detailing creative cheese platter ideas, and secured it to the wall of my fridge with magnets for inspiration. It includes yummy stuff like pine nut brittle, spirals of dried citrus zest, pate and spicy red pepper jelly. In short, it looks absolutely beautiful and oh so sexy. Alas, I had serious doubts about locating many of those items in my shopping.

For tonight’s offering, here’s what I put together:  a brie (which I ended up having to toss because it smelled overwhelmingly of ammonia. Thanks for staying on top of things in the cheese section, Marsh…), a slender chunk of creamy Edam (delicious, rich and buttery), and a wedge of Maytag blue (quickly becoming a go-to for me). A bag of toasted Italian bread rounds (which screamed for some sort of flavor or seasoning), sweet-salty chunks of proscuitto-wrapped cantaloupe, smoked almonds, sliced pear, yellow pepper matchsticks and a ramekin of pickled grapes rounded out the spread.

Valentine's Day dinner cheese platter. Seriously - look how pretty it is!

The grapes are another Molly Wizenberg recipe I cribbed from her “A Homemade Life” memoir. This woman can do no wrong. The seedless grapes are basically just marinated in a vinegar and sugar concoction with some pickling spices. They were fab, almost like tangy chutney with hints of cinnamon and pepper.

pickled grapes

The wine? A friendly and knowledgeable woman at Cork and Cracker steered me toward a lovely French Fleurie red Beaujolais. I like that place more and more each time I go in; they really seem to know their stuff.

The nice thing about having a cheese board for dinner is you can eat and eat and eat without ever really feeling like you’re pigging out. It’s perfect and romantic for a date night. Finger food, feeding each other tastes of things… get the picture?? And because everything is fresh and usually heavy on fruit and fresh items, it all feels fairly healthy.

For dessert, I baked up a batch of red velvet cheesecake swirl brownies. Sadly, I have yet to master the swirl – my marbled effect usually ends up looking pretty uniform. In this case, pink. No matter. They were tasty, and I used a biscuit cutter to carve them into rounds instead of the usual squares for a little something different.

red velvet cheesecake brownie rounds

This Valentine’s Day, dear readers, I hope your lives are full of love, and your love is full of life.