4th of July Barbecue Menu: Burgers and Beans!

Uh... so... July 4th was about two weeks ago. This post is a little late. It has been hot. I have been lazy. Maybe I am just still full and working through a food coma.

I don't know if our menu this time around was super easy, or if A and I are just getting really good at cooking for groups. Enough of our menu lent itself to advance prep that the day of the event we had very little to do. Honestly, I think that is the only way to go if you want to avoid being exhausted already when the guests arrive.

This year, we opted for a theme of classic-ish American dishes. After all, it is 4th of July. 

Menu

Gazpacho Salsa

Bubbamus

Tomato and Mozzarella Pasta Salad

Grilled corn on the cob

Baked Beans

Bacon Cheeseburgers with Chipotle Chiles in Adobo Sauce on Homemade Buns

Homemade Spicy Ketchup

Strawberry and White Chocolate Macarons

Blueberry Pie

Red Velvet Cupcakes

For beverages we just had beer, and lots of it. Despite the heat, we opted to avoid frosty fruity beverages with hard liquor. A's college roommates were visiting and I wanted to avoid  broken furniture and mayhem in my apartment.

Here are 10 things I learned from this barbecue: 

1. Blueberry pie is best served full size. While the mini-pies were nice in theory, it is impossible to get something that gooey out of a mold in one piece. As such, I had to serve the pies in the mold which made them difficult to eat. Though they tasted good, few were willing to go through the effort to consume them. I had a lot left over. Next year, I will be serving standard slices if I make this recipe again. 

2. When making salsa, cut the vegetables very small. Similar to the blueberry pies, our salsa tasted good but was difficult to eat. Using a dice that was too large made it difficult to scoop the salsa up with a chip. 

3. Pureed dips, like our bubbamus are easy to eat and therefore get devoured. Bubbamus is our attempt at making baba ganoush. For some reason it always comes out tasting like hummus, so we have renamed it bubbamus.

4. High quality beef can make the difference between a good burger and a great burger. Thank you Dickson's Farm Stand.  Maybe there is something to be said for all of this grass fed slow food nonsense. 

5. Homemade buns are a piece of cake if you do a little bit of planning, and they taste way better than store bought. For my buns, I made the dough the day before and allowed it to rise in the refrigerator overnight. The day of the barbecue, I pulled the dough out in the morning to let it warm up, shaped the buns, and after a brief period of proofing, stuck them in the oven. If you have an open kitchen, this could be a fun activity for any guests that show up super early to "help out" (read start drinking early!). 

6. Shucking your corn the day before can lead to dried out ears, even if it is wrapped tightly in plastic wrap. 

7. I really love pasta salad - especially when it has lots of garlic and extra virgin olive oil on it.

8. Apparently chipotle peppers in adobo sauce make everything taste better. We added them to the burgers, the homemade ketchup and the beans. It gives off a subtle heat that sneaks up on you. I'm sure if that A might have tried to sneak them into the salsa, pasta salad, and even the cupcakes if I had stopped paying attention. 

9. Beans are the ultimate accompaniment at any barbecue. They can be made up to a month ahead of time and then frozen in freezer bags. We cooked ours completely and then stuck them in the freezer weeks ahead of the party. The night before, we removed them from the freezer to thaw, and then warmed them up in the oven for a bit before serving. They can be served room temperature, so you can even warm them up earlier in the day if you think you might need oven space later. 

10. Red velvet cupcakes are a real crowd pleaser, and patriotic too! Can't beat red white and blue on the fourth of July. 

This might be my last food post before this morphs into a travel blog for a month, though I am hoping I can squeeze one more in before August. A and I are heading out on our big annual vacation in less than two weeks. This year's vacation is to be the vacation of vacations - 5 weeks and 5 countries. We will be making stops in Singapore, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Malaysian Borneo and Indonesia. Needless to say, I don't expect to do any baking while I am gone! For friends and family, we will try to keep this space updated with info and photos of what we see while we are away, and more importantly, what we eat! 

Recipe for my red velvet cupcakes and hamburger buns after the jump!

Christmas in Salem: How to Prepare a Dessert Party for More than Twenty People

The Christmas party in Salem has come and gone in a flurry of flour and powdered sugar. Months of planning and stress resulted in a near picture perfect event for my "catering debut". The menu consisted of nine different desserts presented in bite-sized servings for twenty-five people.

Menu

Pear and Hazelnut Tartlettes

Apple Tartlettes

Flourless Chocolate Cake

Cheesecake with Blueberry Compote & Pomegranate

Coffee Macarons

Citrus Macarons

Marzipan Cupcakes with Bittersweet Chocolate Ganache

Salted Vanilla Cupcakes

Buttermilk Pudding

Overall, a tremendous amount of organization prevented party preparation from being too strenuous. A's family had worried that I would spend our entire stay cooking. While I didn't leave the apartment for three days (whatever, it was cold and snowing), I still had enough time for Christmas dinner and a few rounds of Scrabble. The plan worked seamlessly and all of the cooking and preparation was actually finished hours before the party started. The guests ate until they could not eat anymore, and thankfully, nobody fell into a sugar coma.

Here is what my plan looked like. When pulling together the menu, I made sure to select a number of items that could be partially, if not completely, prepared ahead of time to prevent unnecessary baking on the day of the event.

One Month Before

Prepare crusts for tartlettes and freeze

Prepare hazelnut frangipane and freeze

One Week Before

Poach pears and refrigerate

Bake macaron shells, store in an air-tight container

3 Days Before

Prepare dough for cannoli shells; refrigerate

Prepare white chocolate ganache filling for coffee macarons

Prepare compote filling for apple tartlettes

2 Days Before

Fry cannoli shells

Prepare meyer lemon/cream cheese filling for citrus macarons

Fill all macarons; refrigerate

Prepare and bake flourless chocolate cakes; refrigerate

1 Day Before

Bake marzipan and vanilla cupcakes

Prepare bittersweet chocolate ganache and refrigerate

Prepare buttermilk pudding, refrigerate in serving glasses

Unmold and plate chocolate cakes

Bake cheesecakes

Day of

Assemble and bake apple tartlettes

Assemble and bake pear tartlettes

Cook strawberry sauce for puddings; assemble and garnish puddings

Prepare vanilla cream cheese frosting

Frost all cupcakes

Unmold and garnish cheesecakes

Prepare cannoli filling; assemble cannolis

Prepare fresh whipped cream

... and this is what everything looked like:

 

 

 

 

 

Off to Whistler for some New Year's skiing!

Buttermilk Pudding with Fresh Berries

This weekend I had to set aside some time to test recipes for the holiday party. Though much it has not been written about on this blog, the past few weeks have been a flurry of selecting and testing recipes as I assemble the final menu. A, who usually loves my baking, is actually starting to get burned out on the volume of sweets coming out of the kitchen. I keep promising him that once the holidays are over, I will make an effort to cut down on the sweets.

For much of the menu, I plan to rely a few of my most reliable recipes - marzipan cupcakes, cheesecakes, apple tarts, etc, because they all have a "comfort food" feel that should fit the New England cold. They also tend to be a little "heavy" if you eat to much at once. I needed something light and fruity to round things out. Panna cotta felt like a good place to start. Internet research led me to a recipe for berries and buttermilk pudding on Epicurious. Though not exactly panna cotta, it looked close enough.

I had never made panna cotta/pudding from scratch before. If I had known just how easy it would be, I think it would have been part of my standard repertoire. THe entire recipe, from start to finish, took less than half an hour. If you are pressed for time, you can prepare the pudding a day ahead of time, and then cook the strawberry sauce the day you plan to serve it. The Epicurious recipe claimed two be 4 servings, but I thought it was better broken down into 8 servings. For the topping, any fresh berries will do.

The pudding itself has a very light texture with a slightly tangy flavor. It should make a nice complement for the rich sweets that I plan to serve on the dessert bar.

The first menu item: Apple Tartelettes

The weekend went by all too quickly in a rush of bad weather and errands. On top of that, I've been sick with a winter cold. A WINTER COLD!! Yes, it is October and it really feels almost like winter has arrived. I feel incredibly cheated by all of the global warming cassandras. Here I was looking forward to balmy fall weather and instead I am getting highs of 45.

In addition to annoying me in general, the cold weather also makes me feel like Christmas is just around the corner. Yes, the Christmas Creep has hit our household. No... I haven't decorated or anything, but I am in full planning mode for my mother-in-law's dessert party. This weekend I was finally able to test my first recipe.

Last Christmas A gave me some miniature tart pans for Christmas so I plan to serve two different types of mini-tarts at the event. I am hoping the tarts will save me some time since many components, such as the crusts, can be prepared days, or even weeks ahead of time.

After scouring the Internet for recipes, I found a finally found a winner on Tartelette's blog - her recipe for her grandmother's apple tartelettes. I liked this recipe because it reminded me of apple pie with a twist. The tartelette featured a baked apple filling with pie spices like cardamom, but called for baked apples for the top instead of a lattice or second pie crust. The lemon sugar, vanilla bean, and crushed almonds added unexpected depth to the flavor.

Instead of baking them in medium tart pans as Tartelette did, I used my minis. A half recipe produced enough filling for 9 mini-pans which was great news. A single full recipe should do it for the party.

The prep work was quick and the flavors delicious. I presented them nervously to A, who wanted to know why I couldn't just make plain old apple pie (one of his favorite desserts). A single bite later, I was instructed that the recipe was a winner and apple pie would not be needed.



WOOHOO! One menu item down. Only 8 to go.

I still need to play with the crust for this recipe a little. In my first attempt, the crust stuck to the pans making it difficult to remove the tartelettes without damaging them. This is a problem that I will troubleshoot in the coming weeks.

And of course, this week's posting would not be complete without my weekly bread, a sourdough loaf. I will write about bread in future weeks.