Over dose of cooking, but guests pleased, sated

Yesterday was the day the Phactors cooked a margarita and tapas dinner having auctioned off this event to raise money for church remodeling.  In general TPP regards cooking as fun, but when you are cooking for 12 and preparing several newish recipes, it's also a lot of work.  The menu consisted of the following dishes: 1st - banderillas with olives, cheese, chorizo, pickles, salami, marinated mushrooms, etc. in various combinations of 3, sauted portabello mushroom and goat cheese quesadillas, and grilled, marinated shrimp.  2nd - roasted sweet pepper salad, asparagus wrapped in Spanish ham, and sherried eggplant.  3d - "Russian" potato salad, salmon in mojo sauce, and lastly, almond tacos (think thin cookies shaped like taco shells) filled with seasonal berries and topped with whipped cream.  Of course you want it all to look nice and be prettily presented, and not use a lot of last minute preparation; after all you have guests.  The first course was served with margaritas; the rest with a white sangria.  The weather all day was on-and-off rain, and it was off for the evening, so the party took place in our garden pavilion, but it was a bit cool, not really the best setting for summery food and cold drinks.  Nonetheless, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and the dinner fare, or were at least polite enough to say so.  The four most liked dishes were the roasted pepper salad, the asparagus wrapped in ham, the grilled shrimp, and the berry taco.  This dinner took considerable planning and preparation, and it kept us busy for a full day having started the evening before.  TPP has great admiration for people who do this, and do it well, on a restaurant sized scale. So enough cooking for a day or so, and enough left-overs to allow that. 

Tapas Saturday Shopping

It's a rather bleak looking Saturday, not a good day for outdoor work, and this is probably a good thing because the indoors need policing prior to having our dinner group arrive.  Tonight's menu is Spanish and tapas, which should be fun.  Presently we're making a shopping list, and blogging, only one of which is deemed useful by a narrow majority of those present.  The hardest thing to find is one of the most central of ingredients: Spanish sherries. Over the past 30 years here in a small university city in the upper midwest many things have become much more common.  Cheese used to be a serious problem, but now even groceries have a reasonable selection.  Far more diverse selections of beer and wine are now available.  You find more exotic fruits and veggies. But for some reason sherries remain uncommon with little diversity.  TPP used to get a nice bottle every Christmas because my lovely wife went on a shopping expedition to ChiTown. This year he got an extremely nice bourbon, so that was not a complaint. A successful shopping expedition this morning will require that we find a fairly decent amontillado because obviously sherried chicken livers require sherry.  It's also important because obviously the cook needs a little glass to sip while cooking or the recipe won't come out right at all as is well known. Our foraging expeditions generally follow the 90-90 rule where 90% of all the items you want are found at your first stop, and the remaining 10% of the items take you to the other 90% of places to shop. Well, our caffeine titer seems to have reached a functional level, so our shopping is about to begin, which means the blogging must end.

Tapas for dinner

A tapas dinner party is planned for a week from now.  Tapas are small plate dishes in the Spanish tradition.  The trick is to have a array of dishes with some diversity, some hot, some cold, some with or on bread, some with seafood or ham or sausage, some with pickles and/or olives.  But yet you don't want just willy-nilly either. For reasons not quite clear to the Phactors we probably have more tapas cookbooks than any other category except for maybe Italian.  Tapas dinners are a good excuse, as if one was needed, for drinking a cold Spanish rose wine.  The Phactor had a stash of Spanish chorizo, not at all like the Mexican version, but he used it to make a lentil, chorizo, and kale soup, which proved mildly sensational. Now talk about thoughtful, Mrs. Phactor has replenished my supply of chorizo from her favorite online source of Latin food, Amigo Foods, including Lizano Sauce (Costa Rica) and the passionfruit concentrate (Brazil) she spikes her orange juice with, a behavior left over from our times in the tropics. This does not violate TPP's non-endorsement policy, which would turn this into just one more sell-out blog because it is in our own best interest to keep this place in business, but our volume alone isn't going to do it.  Why not have some reader participation?  What would you suggest we include in our menu?