Dress 4 Dinner

As a long-time vegetarian, I have never been a fan of pseudo-meat dishes….they have always seemed a mystery to me: What is actually in them? And why would someone who has voluntarily sworn off meat want to eat something that attempts to recreate a meat dish?

So I thought that it’d be fun if my mystery dish played off of the mysterious pseudo-meat idea.

• 4 medium zucchini, ends removed and cored (I used a potato peeler, but the Italians apparently have a special tool for the job–a vuotazucchine
• 1 tbls olive oil
• 2 shallots, or a small onion, diced fine
• 4 thick slices course Italian bread, crusts removed
• 3/4 cup grated parmesan or pecorino romano
• 1 egg
• 2 tbls fresh oregano, chopped
• 1 1/2 tbls pine nuts
• 8 oil-cured olives, pitted and quartered
• salt and pepper
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 pinch saffron threads
• 4 zucchini flowers

Sauté the onions in the oil over medium heat until soft, about 5-8 minutes. Set aside. Tear the bread into pieces and process in a food processor to fine crumbs. Add onions, grated cheese, egg, oregano and process until combined. Add pine nuts and olives and pulse several times. Add salt and pepper to taste, and pulse a couple times more.

Stuff the cored zucchini with the bread mixture, pressing the mixture firmly into each zucchini. Place in the sauté pan over medium-high heat and sear each side of the zucchini, turning until lightly charred. Reduce heat and add cream and saffron; cover and simmer until zucchini are tender and cream sauce has thickened, stirring occasionally and turning the zucchini. The stuffing should expand a bit, poking out of the ends of the zucchini for that classic hot dog-in-a-bun look. If the sauce thickens before the zucchini are tender, add more cream. Just before serving, drape the flowers over each zucchini, cover and simmer a couple more minutes.

Plate the zucchini dogs and spoon the sauce over the flowers. Serves 4.

For most of my cooking life, I only knew how to prepare tomatoes one way – as caprese with mozzarella and basil. I made it all the time, oblivious to how many calories are truly contained in a soft round hunk of freshly made mozzarella cheese.

Luckily for me, we visited an Italian restaurant that changed that for me. They prepared the most decadent bruschetta with garlic, basil and olive oil. I added my own twist with this recipe and include some oil cured black olives for a little extra salty punch.

Tomato Bruschetta with Garlic and Basil

20 – 25 grape tomatoes, halved and cleaned of seeds and juices
8 – 10 oil cured black olives, pitted and quartered
1 clove of garlic, minced
8 – 10 fresh basil leaves, chopped fine
Olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper to taste
8 slices from 1 fresh baguette, sliced to about 1/4 inch thickness

Preheat broiler on high. In a bowl, combine tomatoes, black olives, garlic, basil, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper. Stir until well combined. Place baguette slices on baking sheet and broil until just browned. Remove and drizzle with olive oil. Pile tomato mixture on top of each slice and serve. Makes four servings, with two pieces per person.

A Semi-Vegetarian Entrée

For our Mystery Dinner, I was charged with the main dish. Knowing Michael is a vegetarian (who occasionally, eats bacon), I tried to think of something that would be savory, substantial and satisfying. My brain came up with this recipe that I’ve been using for over 30 years. I’d not made it in a very long while.

The Onion Tart was all that I’d remembered, but there were a few glitches that I’ll remember for the next time I make it. Number one is that the pie crust must be “blind baked” before filling and when I did it, I baked it at too low a temp. My oven’s thermometer is wonky and the thermometer that I’ve placed inside it to help me monitor the actual temperature gives different readings, based on if it’s in the front or rear of the oven.

The other lesson was that the recipe calls for the tart to bake at 325 degrees, which I believe is just too low/slow. The tart “set up” just fine, but it didn’t brown. I should have turned on the broiler and given it a nice golden glow, but I didn’t.

Onion Tart

3 large onions, peeled & thinly sliced (3 cups)

3 Tablespoons butter

1 10-inch pie crust, partially baked (10 minutes)[1]

1 cup milk, divided

1 cup cottage cheese

1 cup dairy sour cream

1 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon seasoned pepper[2]

3 eggs, beaten

1 Tablespoon flour

1/3 cup grated Cheddar cheese

Cooked bacon or ham (optional)

1 tsp. Mrs. Dash Original

Simmer onions until soft in hot butter or margarine. Turn into baked pie shell. Add crumbled bacon, reserving some for the top. Combine ¾ cup milk, cottage cheese, sour cream, salt, pepper and eggs; mix well. Blend remaining ¼ cup milk with flour; stir into sour cream mixture. Mix well; pour over onions in pie shell. Sprinkle with grated cheese. Bake at 325 degrees for 30 to 35 minutes. Tart should be firm in center. If desired, garnish with crisp bacon strips or sliver of cooked ham. Makes eight servings.

[1] You can use premade or use your own. I used a glass pie pan, but you can also use a large tart pan with a removable bottom.

[2] I just grind mine, b/c I’m not sure what seasoned pepper is.

On the whole, our menu for the Mystery Dinner turned out far better than any of us hoped. We ended up with a group of tasty delights.

Apéritif

Citrus Sangria
sauvignon blanc, sliced oranges, lemons, limes, topped with a spritz of lemon-lime soda

Starter

Andra’s Bruschetta
toasted baguette, lavished with EV olive oil, mounded with seeded grape tomatoes, oil cured black olives, garlic, chiffonade of basil

Bollini, 2008 Pinot Grigio, Trentino

Main

Onion Tart
sliced Palmetto Sweet onions, bound with custard enriched with sour cream, cottage and cheddar cheese, flavored with mixed herbs and studded with bacon nuggets

Blossoming “Zucchini Dogs”
local zucchini cored and stuffed with herbed bread crumbs, oil-cured olives and pine nuts, sautéed in a saffron cream sauce and garnished with squash blossoms

Bollini, 2008 Pinot Grigio, Trentino

Grand vin de Bordeaux, Château d’Arveyres, 2008 Graves de Vayres, Appelation Graves de Vayres Contrôlée, Cuvée Prestige

Dessert

Double Chocolate Cake
dark chocolate cake with raspberry jam filling and deep chocolate frosting garnished with slivered almonds

Espresso
Made  & served Italian-style, with a twist

Hot pink oleanders were the punch I needed in this centerpiece.

So well did I participate in the Mystery Dinner theme, I even hid from myself what flowers were to be on the table.

Actually, I was so focused on the other items I needed to do for the dinner party, like clean the toilets and mop the kitchen floor, that I forgot to go cut some flowers for the table. As you may know if you are a regular reader, I prefer to use what’s in season and growing on the land around me.

Just about an hour before dinner, I rushed outside and snipped some hot pink oleanders, crape myrtle, cedar, and multicolored lantanta.

Many people don’t think of oleander as a cut flower because it doesn’t last a long time, but if you cut it and immediately put the freshly cut stems in water, they will be fine for an evening. However, keep your animals away because they are not to be chewed upon or nibbled by them. Doing so will poison your four-footed friends and if you have others in your household who are tempted to nibble on greenery, leave the oleander out. My first “crush” boyfriend brought me some small vials of Oleander perfume from Bermuda. While I knew oleander as a landscape shrub, I had no idea that it was a perfume until I opened the present. That was a mystery to me.

Lantana is one of my favorite landscaping flowers because the hummers love it and it has a spicy scent. When you cut it you will note that the leaves are slightly ragged and may give you a scratchy feel. Some have a rash in reaction to handling it, so if you are sensitive, wear gloves. Don’t let that be a mystery to you.

Crape myrtles are not native to the Charleston area, but I thought they were when I was a child. My grandmother’s yard in Summerville was lined with them. Their slick bark and fluffy petals were one of my chief delights. One of her trees was just large enough to be easily climbed by my 6 year old self. It was one of the best places to hide from my siblings or my cousins when we played hide-and-seek.

Hide-and-seek. A perfect theme for our Mystery Dinner flowers.

One common thread of Dress4Dinner is that the event has a thematic focus. Maybe it is a crutch, but it helps to drive forward the design of the event, and it certainly helps to inspire the menu for the meal. So when the Mystery Dinner theme was put forth, and even more so when it was defined to include four separate menu components made without the knowledge of the other three, I began preparing myself for a major menu fail.

This particular D4D is going to be a small affair with two seasoned D4D couples; what could go wrong? Just about everything. I approach the design of a meal with the eye of, well, a designer, so little is left to chance in the conception of the menu: plenty of things can go awry in the execution, so I like to have a good sense up front of how it will all come together.

In the case of the Mystery Dinner I see three major risks:

Seasonal and Local = Same, Same, Same

As great as it is to focus our eating around what is fresh and available, in our climate in August, that could easily mean okra, okra, okra. Actually, I was worried about tomato, tomato, tomato. Since Andra was assigned the starter, and she loves to cut up tomatoes for her favorite trio of tomato salads, I felt confident she would be doing something with tomatoes (that she asked me to pick up some tomatoes from the Farmers Market was also a tip-off). It would have been easy for the rest of us to unwittingly contribute two additional tomato-based dishes; imagine a menu of tomato salad, stuffed tomatoes, and a tomato pie….tomato gelato anyone?

Mash-up or Mush

As much as ingredients can define the vocabulary of a meal, texture is its punctuation. The harmony of rock, paper, scissors can be recreated in menu-planning: balance the textures of the food so that you can create a range of experiences for the lips, tongue and teeth. Without the benefit of a coordinated design, our Mystery Dinner risked becoming a pabulum of too-similar textures.

Rustic Ruins Refined

A menu mismatched between formal high-concept dishes and relaxed comfort food can be as awkward as having guests show up over-dressed or under-dressed (not to mention un-dressed). Pot Luck and Pot au Creme make a nice alliterative pairing, but may not make for a nice match on the table. Now, if one creatively combined them….hmm….a Frogmore Stew Soufflé?

Risky as it is, we will assemble our Mystery D4D out of dishes that are completely uncoordinated. How will it turn out? It’s a mystery….

These figures from the mystery game Clue offer some portent as to the characters who'll be present at our dinner. The lady in the red dress is certainly Andra. MTM is the dapper gent and I am most positively the frumpy chef.

Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?” ~Charles de Lint quotes (Celtic folk musician and story teller, b.1951

Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.” ~Julia Cameron

If there is no mystery in life, I get bored. So when Dress4Dinner premiere host and hostess Andra and MTM invited us to Dress for Dinner with them, we agreed with no hesitation.

Because I enjoy a dinner party theme and wondering what the theme for our joint dinner might be, I asked Andra. She informed me that she thought a mystery dinner would be in order. Not that kind of mystery dinner, where you have to endure dinner and guess who dunnit.  Instead, she proposed that we each prepare a course, not knowing what the other was preparing.

Without organization, I could envision the potluck where everyone brings lettuce. Instead, Andra suggested that she would make the starter, I would make the entrée/main, MTM would create a side dish and I would make dessert.  Andra and MTM carried it a bit farther than even I expected because neither of them revealed to the other what each was preparing.

What ensues will be a mystery, but undoubtedly a tasty one!

We have a blank slot in our Dress 4 Dinner cycle. While we’ve filled it this time with a mystery dinner, we are looking for a fourth household to participate in our little soiree-throwing, good-time generating, food-and-drink fun-fest.

Here are the details:

• Host a dinner party in your home for you and three other people (4 people total).
• Choose a theme for the dinner. Looking back at some of our menus and themes ranges all over the map, meaning that the theme doesn’t have to be elaborate or cost bazillions of dollars to pull off. In fact, one of the reasons I personally wanted to do this was to get out moldering crystal and linens and use them more often.
• Post for two weeks, really and truly about anything related to planning and execution of your Dress 4 Dinner event.
• Reply to comments on your blog posts and promote the blog in your network.

It is really easy and fun. At every single dinner we’ve had, we’ve ended up sitting around the table for hours: talking, laughing, sharing, and getting to know people in a more meaningful way. Oh, and eating some amazing food.

If you’re worried about cost, don’t be. Our last Dress 4 Dinner – Riffs on Foods We Hated as Kids – cost us less than $50 to pull off for four people, proving that entertaining does not have to break one’s pocketbook. This project is more about the old fashioned dinner party spirit and less about bling and wow.

If you’re interested in learning more about D4D or in becoming a contributor, please reply to this post with a comment, message me on Facebook (Andra Watkins) or direct message me on Twitter (@andrawatkins).

Having a Dress 4 Dinner that included a kid, as well as foods we’ve historically hated, was a challenge for us. It stretched us creatively, forced us to look at our childhoods in funny ways, and made us all try new things. We had a blast doing this meal and recommend a version of it to anyone seeking a trip back in time via dinner party. Make up your own menu, invite a couple of people over, and see what happens.

Cayleigh probably said it best in her thank you note. I’ll leave this Dress 4 Dinner cycle with her words on the page. I particularly love her PS on the green side. Isn’t it great when a kid finds a new food and is “making her mom make it?” That was the ultimate gift from this Dress 4 Dinner cycle, though Alice, her mother, may beg to differ with me.

What kid wouldn’t like things called Poppers? Whether they’re called that ’cause you can just pop’em into your mouth, or whether they pop with flavor when they hit your tongue, the idea of Poppers is small concentrated bursts of flavor, texture and fun. For our D4D we concocted three different riffs on the concept, each one taking on one of our despised-when-we-were-kids foods.

Olive Poppers

• Oil-cured black olives, pitted
• Pine-nuts, toasted until browned
• Fresh oregano

Simply stuff each olive with two-three toasted pine nuts and a few oregano leaves. Done. If you need to complicate it, you could add red pepper flake or two.

Tomato Poppers

• Cherry tomatoes, cored from one end
• Basil leaves
• Fresh mozzarella, cut into pieces small enough to stuff into the cherry tomatoes
• olive oil
• balsamic vinegar
• salt and pepper

Simply drip some olive oil and balsamic vinegar into each tomato, add a little salt and pepper, and stuff with a piece of mozzarella wrapped in basil. Try not to eat too many before serving.

Potato Poppers

• Small new potatoes, boiled until just tender
• Bacon, cooked until just before crisp, then sliced into strips just long enough to wrap the potatoes
• Cheddar cheese, cut into small rectangular strips
• salt and pepper
• Canola or peanut oil for frying

Okay, this one takes a few extra steps. After the boiled potatoes have cooled, create a ‘corer’ from a big straw (like one for a malt/shake or frappaccino) by cutting it down to 2 inches with an angled cut. Carefully insert the straw into one end of each potato, twist slightly, and remove, leaving  a void in the potato (don’t push the straw all the way through). Insert a piece of cheddar cheese. Wrap the potato along the axis of the void with a bacon strip, covering the end of the hole to keep the cheese in; secure the bacon with a toothpick. Heat the oil to 375° and fry the potato popper, turning once. Drain on a paper towel, and lightly salt and pepper. Serve.

All in all, each of these was a terrific success, and together they presented such a pretty plate, like a burst of colorful fireworks to kick off the meal. And for a kid-friendly D4D, what could be better?