Refreshing

As a quick credit, I may have pilfered this idea from Joy The Baker. Also, if I ever use the word "may," I actually mean "will," "have," "did" or some variation on that theme. That said, today I have a salad for you. Well, it is technically a salad in that some green bits most assuredly exist within it and we're making a dressing, however, it's not a pansy little side salad. It is carb central. We have rice and potatoes and chickpeas and all sorts of good stuff. There is an argument to be made that it is healthy, though I wouldn't necessarily say that it's slimming.

Being who I am, I took Joy's recipe and made the dressing far more acidic and stripped down some of the embellishments since I didn't have a bushel of parsley sitting in my refrigerator. It's delicious and a really great summer evening meal when you just don't have it in you to eat something hot and straight out of the oven. The salad works equally well cold as it does with the potatoes and rice still warm, and if you make a sizable batch, you can snack on it for days... or feed it to your family, if you want to be nice.

Don't worry, making dressing is actually easier than shaking the bottle of the store bought kind enough to have the perfect distribution of floating bits.

Crepes! Part deux.

Now that we've covered how to make a crepe, I think it's time to make a main dish with them. Admittedly, you could just go out, buy some tortillas, and stuff them to the bursting point with this filling... or you could just leave the crepes off completely like I did in the top photograph because I happened to have some extra filling and wanted to eat it immediately. Yes, I could have made another crepe, but I didn't. I'm not sorry.

So! If you want to fill crepes with tasty quasi-Mexican goodness, I have a delightful option for you. As a warning, however, for those of you out there who love garlic even close to as much as I do, do not use more garlic in this, it will eat you alive.

That said, here we go...

Bookends: Desserts

So, the other evening I saw "Despicable Me." It was cute and charming and has the best theme song if you happen to be a smidge cranky. The chorus is brilliant. Here, take a listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lJRTeCMvGc

Now, when one is in such a mood, what is the proper response? Dessert! Yes, I'm cliche today, just acknowledge it and we'll move on. At my little dinner party with the ricotta pillows, I stole yet another Southern Living recipe for the desserts, with a few small modifications.

Original Recipe: http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=1990016

My changes were simple. First, I didn't have time to make the little pie crust cups, so I used store bought frozen pastry cups. Secondly, I did not use baking bars, but rather a couple of bars of dark chocolate because that's what I had in the house and I'm a firm believer that dark chocolate makes everything better. To make up for these forays into laziness, I did at least make the whipped cream myself with the whipping cream left over. I just threw in a completely blind guess worth of splenda and vanilla and whipped it by hand until it looked pretty and tasted amazing. I find that the vanilla addition to the whipped cream compliments the dark chocolate especially well.

And now you have an extremely simple crowd pleaser for your next dinner party. Added bonus: no tell-tale fork marks if you ate one before the guests arrived...

Bookends: Appetizers

I find that the most difficult part of having people over to the house for dinner is pulling together a coherent meal that includes something for them to snack on when they walk in the door, and is topped off with a sweet treat at the end of the evening. It's easy to pick one or the other, or the main meal, but having a series of items that make some form of logical combination drives me up the wall. Perhaps I just need more Thai appetizers to match my love of curries and coconut based desserts.

Yum. Coconut.

Ok, back to the matter at hand. Today we will discuss a fairly versatile appetizer that tastes amazing and appears substantially more complicated than it actually is. Basically, it's a ricotta-based filling for crepes that people can eat as finger food. It took my 5 guests approximately 3 minutes to eat 15 or so of these little gems. More importantly, you can serve it with Italian, some American, or French without worrying in the slightest. Yes, it requires you to make crepes, but they are so much easier than you think they are. In fact, they are not just "easier" (especially if you think they are "oh god what am I doing" difficult), they are downright simple.

But you need to buy a crepe pan. They aren't expensive and they are your personal vehicle to looking very fancy in front of your friends and having an excuse to eat Nutella whenever you want.

That said...