Party Food And Other Culinary Adventures

I’m slowly adjusting to regular life again and I may at some point write up a food and craft review for 2018, but it’s much more fun to talk about parties! Although I did completed an astonishing 145 sewing/craft projects! I will probably write about those for sure.

We had our annual Epiphany party on January 5 and it was our most successful one yet! We had about 20- 25 people come and it was lovely to see all of them. There was a mini craft night takeover, when I think four or five of the craft night people were here. I half expected them to break out into boughts of knitting! 🙂 The party is always an interesting mix of people since we tend to invite pretty much everyone we know who is local, and it’s fun to watch and see how much people have in common or what they end up talking about. My favorite time, of course, is when I don’t have to guide any of the conversations; they all just happen naturally! The tablecloth gained many signatures this year and it made my heart full and happy. This year there were several children in attendance and Fancy was super happy. At one point there were children on all sides and she was soaking it all in. She was, of course, exhausted that night and the rest of the next day. Silly girl.

But enough of the guest talk, I’m sure you really are much more interested in the food!

I promised a friend I would share the rulle recipe and was able to get permission from my Dad, although he seemed a bit reluctant… I sweet talked him into it though. 🙂

So here’s the Arten Family Rulle Recipe- from Great Grandma Asta. Hopefully if I get it too wrong, one of my parents will let me know. 🙂

Ingrediants:

1 flank steak, trimmed and pounded thin, 1-2 pork chops chopped finely, 1 medium onion, chopped finely, salt, pepper, “too much allspice.” Maybe start with a half tablespoon of allspice. I normally make a layer of allspice thick enough that the meat looks dark. Obviously, when I make it, I don’t use pork. My parents used veal this year and it was pretty good, but I think you can safely just use the flank steak and it will be fine.

Method:

Cut a long piece of kitchen twine. (Longer than you think you’ll need, because you really don’t want to be messing around trying to cut kitchen twine covered in steak germs and allspice. Ask me how I know that one. ) After pounding out the flank steak, lay flat and add the pork chops, onions, salt, pepper, and allspice. Starting with the long side, roll the flank steak as tightly as you can around the other ingrediants, attempting to keep as much in as possible. Tie the twine as tightly as possible around the meat tying off the ends. It will shrink while cooking, so you want it extra tight.

Put the meat roll into a large pot of salted water and bring to a boil, then simmer for 2-3 hours until it smells delicous and you really want to eat it all right then. Let it cool and then put it into a bowl of saltwater brine. I figure out the brine ratio by adding salt to my bowl until it is cloudy and won’t absorb more salt. While in the beinw, the meat needs to be completely submerged, so take a jar or something with a cap, fill it with water, and put it on top of a plate or bowl that can compress it underwater. Leave it in the brine for 3-7 days.

There was some debate on this question this year and I made the rulle on New Year’s Day and it was perfect, so around 4 days. The family recipe doesn’t specify brining time, much to our suprise. The day you want to serve it, drain the meat roll and cut off the twine. Using a serrated knife, cut thin slices. Cooks get to “test” all the bits that come off while cutting and you can hoard them from other people if you want. 🙂 Put the rulle on thin sliced, buttered bread. My parents use rye, but I don’t enjoy the little cocktail rye bread, so prefer to use french bread. Let me know if you make it!

We had crab dip and the family meatballs, as well as a cheese and meat tray. I didn’t get to eat the Christmas Eve meatballs at my parents’ house this year and was surprised by how much I missed them. There wasn’t time to make a porkless batch before my parents’ party. Their table looked like this:

Just in case you were wondering where I get my crazy ideas of appropriate amounts of party food from. That’s the family tablecloth, which has been in our family since the 60’s. There was moose on the table, thanks to my younger brother’s girlfriend and her dad. Apparently this moose was trying to stomp on his sled dogs, so he had some extra meat for the winter.

So Scadinavian tradition says you should have 7 different kinds of cookies and a filled cake, but I was short on the cake part. I did have 8 kinds of cookies though, so I figured it worked. A lot of the cookies on our table this year were not the traditional ones from my childhood. We decided that on the years we go up to visit for Christmas, I maybe don’t need to make as many. This year, there were three cookie recipes that were repeated and the rest were new.

The Husband enjoys chewy chocolate chip cookies the most, so these have been the best recipe we have found so far. It’s from a Food Network instert book of 50 Chocolate Chip Cookies. I have no idea which edition it came from.

The Chocolate Peppermint Cookies were awful. Dry as a dessert, not enough mint flavor and I ended up throwing probably half the dough away. Far too many unladylike words were coming out of my mouth. The directions were confusing too and the dough would not roll out evenly no matter what I did. I actually think you need an industrial asphalt roller to make it work. They were from this year’s Christmas Cookie Edition of Food Network- December 2018.

The Apple Pie Tassies were from December 2017. They were definitely a hit. I accidentally used the whole block of cream cheese, instead of just 6 oz, but I think it made it better. The dough starts with cream cheese and two sticks of butter, so hard to mess up. I would make these again, but make the shells smaller, so that the filling to shell ratio was more even.

These were both from December 2018 FN too. The maple snickerdoodles were from a gift idea page in the front. I was a bit disappointed in the lack of aple flavor. It called for maple sugar and I probably should have used the maple syrup substitution instead. We have the delicious syrup from our friends’ Sugarbush that I would like to try. They tasted good though, just not enough maple.

The Brownie cookies are fantastic! I made a different recipe in the UP and that one was not as fudgy and delicious. This one tastes pretty much like the middle of a brownie, which is my very favorite part. The Husband might like these almost as much as the chocolate chip ones, so they will definitely go on my rotation. It makes a smaller batch too, so less chance of leftovers. Not that you’ll have leftovers.

We had to have PB balls, of course. They were one of the traditional things on the table and I think have ruined me for Reese’s! I mean, these aren’t that complicated and are sooooo much better!

One of our friends brought us a Japanese cheesecake to try and it was really good. I was especially excited to try it, as I had wanted to make one for the cheesecake battle. It was a bit more like cake in texture than cheesecake, but was still delicious. There is a possibility that I ate it for breakfast.

We had a pickle tray with many homemade pickles on it, including some of the squash pickles that made my Dad eat zucchini. Apparently besides using it as a bazooka, pickles are the only way to eat that particular squash. 🙂 My Mom graciously gave me a bigger pickle tray this year, so we used that and it made them look even prettier.

These lemon cookies were dairy and gluten free and were suprisingly good. I’ve not had a lot of luck with gluten free cookies that aren’t grainy, but these were fluffy and light. They are from this website: https://www.noshtastic.com/easy-lemon-cookies-gluten-dairy-free/

Everyone enjoyed them, especially the people with some dietary restrictions. Made with margarine, they end up being vegan too, I believe.

We had so many people at the party that when our close friends came later in the party, I cornered K and reported that I was almost out of cheese and there were only three brownie cookies left. She talked me down and we enjoyed the rest of the party, but let’s assume I had some pretty crazy eyes going on there.

In exciting, non-party culinary adventures, we had friends over for pjs, Pixar movies, and fancy foods on New Year’s eve. I made Scallops, but they were not pretty, so no pictures. We had lobster Mac and Cheese from the October 2018 FN, I think. It’s a Pioneer Woman recipe, if you want to look it up on the FN website. We enjoyed it and used lobster tails so I wouldn’t freak out as much about cooking a whole lobster.

K brought a Pioneer Woman Twice Baked Potato that was divine! She also brought veggies and a cheese and cracker selection. You know, because the four of us became an army overnight and needed additional foodstuffs… That’s probably a big reason we’re such good friends.

For New Year’s Day breakfast, we had homemade Sour Cream Doughnuts from Voracious by Cara Nicoletti. They were delicious and mostly had hearts in the middle. We made cinnamon sugar and glazed doughnuts. The glaze in the book was a terrible one and just soaked into the doughnuts and made them soggy. We ended up just making our own with milk and powdered sugar. We had eggs and chicken apple sausages too to counteract the sugar.

But even before our exciting New Year foods, we did something even crazier. I made a molten lava cake in the Instant Pot to go along with a very nicely grilled steak. It was all the Husband’s fault because he looked so shocked that you could make a lava cake in the Instant Pot. I would use a bittersweet chocolate next time. The semi sweet was not decadent enough.

I think I finally decided what to do with the food portion of the blog this year. The Husband got me Alex Guarnaschelli’s The Home Cook   for Christmas and there are so many good recipes that it made me think I should take some time and really focus individually on my cookbooks. I made it through most of them, but there are still a bunch of recipes in each I would like to try. So for the next little while, I will be taking a closer look at each book. I’m still not sure how my posts will be structured, but hopefully it will be interesting.

Not surprisingly, the first one will be the Guarnaschelli cookbook. I have several dishes from it planned for this week, along with some old favorites too.

For now though, I should probably go to bed, before the thought of all those recipes makes me hungry again! Have a good night!