The journey of a community dinner.
Have you heard about that silly battle going on between Jerry Seinfeld’s wife and the other lady over their similar cookbooks? Heads up ladies — you can’t patent a recipe. Their idea of “hiding” vegetables in other foods to increase the nutritional value isn’t anything new around my house. My mom has been putting vegetable purees in foods for years and we all know that lovely Weight Watchers apple sauce trick when baking.
Or how about a little broccoli and spinach hidden in your penne meat sauce?
Last night’s community dinner celebrated my neighbor John’s 24th birthday. (Yep, he’s a wee.) Alma made a lovely orange and chocolate cheesecake that was nearly too pretty to eat, although everyone managed.
It had a chocolate crust and orange zest in the filling. It was out of this world!
I gave John a giant box of wine as a gag gift. He once mentioned that since he was from northern California, he could never drink wine from a box. It was against his constitution. I wanted to take off my flip flop and hit him over the head to knock that snobbiness right out of him. No one in my house is too good for boxed wine, or for free food. So, we collectively laughed ourselves silly last night when he tore into his gift and got a bit of humility handed to him in the process. Ha!
This is a snob-free zone.
John’s favorite food is Italian; I made meat sauce from the latest Cooks Illustrated, whole wheat penne pasta and salad. Shayla brought a wonderful garlic green bean dish and many friends brought wine in a bottle to soothe a certain ego or two. I also made another loaf of that no-knead bread and this time added more beer — the result was amazing. This is the best loaf so far. Hooray for beer!
Bread, one of the sauce’s secret ingredients.
Roasted for garlic butter.
See? You can’t even see the green. Bwahaha!
The pasta sauce called for mushrooms, which I forgot to buy. Instead I substituted a can of drained spinach and a pound of broccoli, which I stuck in the food processor with the meat, bread and other ingredients. Deceptively delicious indeed. It was a sneaky way of adding a lot of vegetables to the meal, which also stretched out the sauce. Good thing too because we had 11 people there last night and I wanted left overs for lunch today. Too bad I couldn’t bring in a little boxed wine too.
Feliz Cumpleanos, Juan.
~K
P.S. I worry about my brother, who lives in Denver, a lot. Like it could be my second job. I figure karmically, the nicer I am to my neighbors, the nicer people will be to my bro. I welcome newbies from other states to community dinner and some how the universe will turn this into a great meal for my brother with new friends. Or so I hope.