Continuing with my international cooking project, I've posted the Costa Rican and Creole dishes I made. Yum!

I have re-started my international food project, a project to cook food from different cuisines alphabetically. I started this a decade ago, and I'm still on the "C"s. Part of the problem has been that originally I was making complete menus for each cuisine and serving them at dinner parties - with two kids, a constantly messy house and limited time, "dinner parties" have not been happening for us for years. So, I'm now going to be cooking a sample of dishes from each cuisine over a number of nights. That means that I'm less likely to make appetizers (which is not necessarily a bad thing, as appetizers are not as common in many cuisines) and even desserts.

In the last few weeks I've made Czech, Cuban and Creole food. I'm still working on the latter, but here are the recipes for the two former:

- Marga's Cuba Culinary Adventure

- Marga's Czech Culinary Adventure

Enjoy!

Christmas Eve dinner is invariably the most elaborate and stressful meal I cook all year. It's a lot of work and I do always wonder if it's really worth the effort - though Mike, at least, seems to appreciate it. That said, my recollection of most Christmas dinners usually fades quickly, though some dishes (the roast from 2004, the amazing rack of lamb from 2008) are well worth remembering. This year's meal was OK. Everything was good, nothing was spectacular. Or maybe I'm just bored with cooking and eating, who knows? In any case, here are the recipes.

Mac & Cheese - made this for the kids, but they were too excited to eat anything at all that night. The only one who had some was Mika and she loved it.

Hors d'ouvres

Mixed Nuts
Blue Cheese & Caramelized Onions Squares
Persimmon Bread with butter

Meal

Mushroom Soup - an old favorite

Piperade on sun-dried tomato bread toast

Beef Wellington served with
Collard Greens with Bacon and
Buttertnut squash gnocchi with sage butter

For dessert my friend Lola brought a cake which I served with homemade Maple Walnut Ice Cream.

I'd say that my favorite dish were the blue cheese squares, though everything was quite good.

Marga's Party & Holiday Menus

Marga's Best Recipes

I've finally settled on my menus for my Hanukkah party and Xmas Eve and I have to say I'm quite pleased with both of them. Let's see how they turn out.

Hanukkah Menu

- Latkes with apple sauce & sour cream
- A salad (I've asked Desiree to bring it)
- Brisket with Tzimmes (from The Frugal Gourmet Celebrates Christmas)
-Yom Kippour Tajine (from The Great Book of Couscous), I'm making this for friends who don't eat red meat.
-Dreidle cake

I'm passing on the doughnuts (unless the cake does not turn out to look like a dreidle, in which case we'll have a quick trip to the doughnut store).

Xmas Eve Menu

Now this is the one important meal for us, which is my biggest production of the year:

- Curried Coconut Soup with Chickpeas
-Flamishe with mixed greens in a champagne vinaigrette
-Standing Rib Roast with Porcini & Bacon Sauce served with roasted vegetables, noisette potatoes and yorkshire pudding.
-Gladys' Peppermint Chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream

Yesterday we had a BBQ in honor of Mike's birthday. I didn't make anything new, but IMHO what I made was quite good and would recommend it for your (or my) next BBQ. Lola brought the salad, and I served chips with salsa and guacamole and my great potato salad, but otherwise all there was was protein (and birthday cake):

-Hot dogs
-BBQ chicken
-Thyme marinated tri-tip
-Tofu Satay

I trimmed and coated the tri-tip with coarse salt before marinating it, and it came out perfectly.

I served the tofu satay plain (without peanut sauce), but my vegetarian (and non-vegetarian) friends loved it - so much so that they took the leftovers to grill at home :-) I didn't have Madeira wine for the recipe this time, so I used port instead.

I think that with my finishing of this Cypriot Menu I'm off the Mediterranean for a while - though I still have to make desserts from the Baleares to finish off the area. I ate a lot of Mediterranean food in May and June: Balearic, Cretan, Cypriot, Corsican, Caprese and Catalan. Though Mediterranean food is great, I can't say that I'm sorry to leave this region to explore others.

Marga's International Recipes.

I finished this Cretan menu over a month ago, but only now I wrote up the last recipe. Cretan food is very similar to Greek food and it's, therefore, quite good. Check out the recipes at:

http://www.marga.org/food/int/crete/

As for this week, I will be finishing off Cyprus and hopefully making a dessert from Croatia and another from the Baleares (to finish off those cuisines). One of my friend gave me a South American cookbook, so after that I'd like to move on to Colombia. There are a lot of "C"s I want to cover after that, at least two of them in dinner-party format. It'll take a while.

I've just finished cooking and writing up my Catalan and Corsican menus.

I'd specially recommend the Catalan Civet de Porc and the Corsican cheese & mint beignets.

Next on the agenda, Baleares (I'd skipped it before), Chilean & Cretan food.

I've just posted a couple of international menus that I've cooked in the last couple of weeks:

My Comorian Menu features a typical fish stew, a roasted chicken with western and south Asian influences and some very basic but very good banana fritters.

My Champagnoise Menu includes an amazing leek tart and a Champagne version of coq au vin.

I have just posted three new menus from my International Cooking project. They are:

-Auvergnat
Amazing food from this region in France. I didn't cook it earlier because I hadn't been able to find recipes.

-Colonial
Surprisingly modern food from colonial America

-Curaçao
A journey from Asia to Africa that is very Caribbean

In the next few weeks I'll be working on Champenois, Comorian and Corsican recipes.

Delicious food from Sri Lanka, including mulligatawny soup, a lamb curry and a pretty western dessert. Find them at:

http://www.marga.org/food/int/ceylon/

Yesterday, we had some friends over to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birthday. I decided to have a tea party, and the following is the menu. One of my friends is vegan, so I got a couple of vegan treats for him - which ended up being the stars of the table. Here is what I served:

-Harrods No. 14 English Breakfast tea
I got this at the London airport last year, and I was quite happy with its full, balanced taste. A good black tea.

-Chicken Salad sandwiches
-Tomato & Avocado sandwiches

on vegan whole wheat bread, with hummus. They were good, 2yo Jaime loved them, but I thought they tasted too much of hummus. Next time I'll try to use less (maybe only spread it on one slice of the bread)

-Trader Joe's Mushroom Turnovers

-Iced and plain Rolled sugar cookies
in heart and Darwin fish shapes (see below). I wasn't thrilled about the taste of the cookies, but they held their shape beautifully - great for the skinny legs of the Darwin fish.
The icing recipe was great and I'm posting it next.

-Vegan orange poppy-seed cookies
Very, very tasty, recipe to follow

-Trader Joe's Apple Streudel
This vegan dessert was delicious, a little bit on the sweet side, but with a great flaky buttery (but made with no butter) crust. Vegan or not, you should definitely try it.

-Birthday Cake!
What's a birthday without a birthday cake? My friend Fanny brought it, she made it from scratch, and it was delicious. We sang the birthday boy "Happy Birthday", the kids blew the candles and devoured the cake.

And that was it. We watched the beginning ("Nace la Tierra" or "The Earth is born") of "Érase una vez el hombre", a French series, translated into Spanish, that I watched when I was a kid. This cartoon series records the history of human kind from the beginning of the earth until the 70's, when the series was made. The series is not always historically accurate, but it's a great introduction for children to history. The beginning is particularly good as it shows the evolution of mankind from a cell to a human being.

Katrina read a book on the history of the universe to the children, and Fanny read parts of a biography of Darwin. Mike played the Monty Python universe song, and everyone had fun and learned a little bit about Darwin. Alas, the kids (the oldest being 7 1/2 yo) can't quite understand the theory of evolution yet. I didn't learn it until I was in college, so I can't fault them for that.

Marga's Party Recipes

Continuing my project of cooking International Food, in recent weeks I've made Californian and Chadian food. Pasta, short ribs and even duck were part of the former's menu, while the latter featured a delicious roasted chicken and an ever-present peanut stew.

My menu for the Central African Republic is now online. It features a chicken couscous, beef in cumin sauce and ginger cakes.

I'll be cooking more international food in the weeks to come - now that I'm caught up putting up the recipes. Next stop is Chad. After that I'll be going back in the alphabet to A and cooking Arizonan cuisine (I just found an Arizonan cookbook at the library).

My international cooking project.

My 2008 Christmas Eve Dinner may very well be my last Christmas dinner for a while. I loved the menu and I loved cooking it and serving it and eating it, but it was a two day affair (three, if you count shopping), and it was exhausting. I also spent more time in the kitchen during the meal than I really wanted to. I'm also not sure that it made sense financially - taking my guests to a relatively nice restaurant would have probably been cheaper. But hey, it was a nice experience and the food was great.

This time dinner included Mike and I, our two daughter, my father & sister, and our friends Lola and Ignatius. Great company.

I started by serving a Mixed green salad with balsamic vinaigrette. I wanted to use the very expensive balsamic vinegar Mike got me for Xmas last year. The results were very good.

This was followed by Butternut squash soup with cider cream. Apparently my father has not stopped raving to my mother about the soup. Everyone else also said they liked it, and given that Mika (my 6.5 yo) had seconds, I'm inclined to believe them.

The third course consisted of panettini served with Hot artichoke & spinach dip and Mushroom ragout. Everyone loved the dip - I enjoyed the mushrooms. They're both dishes I might make again (the dip definitely if Kathy, my sister, requests it again) - plus I now have a dish for it.

The fourth course was supposed to be Rost Rack of Lamb with Madeira Peppercon Reduction served with Toasted Israeli Couscous with Pine Nuts and Parsley, Roasted cauliflower and steamed broccoli. Alas, I neglected to trim the lamb, and it took much, much, much longer to cook than I imagined. Alas again, by the time I realized that, I had already served the sides - so the couscous turned out to be the fourth course. Fortunately, it was absolutely delicious.

The cauliflower wasn't as successful. I'd cooked it in the toaster oven because I didn't have the main oven was busy with the lamb (and I only have one oven). I removed it when it started to brown, and that apparently was too soon as it was undercooked. I had to throw out most of it.

It took quite a while for the lamb to hit the table, and I did have to cut it in individual chops in order to cook it quicker (which reminds me, I really need a carving knife), but it was absolutely delicious. I would definitely recommend serving it on the rare side of medium-rare (as I did by default). It was moist, tender and incredibly flavorful. I did buy it at a good butcher, Enzo's Meat & Poultry's in Rockridge, and at $17lb it was $4-5lb more expensive than the lamb at the supermarket & Costco. But it was domestic, which I wanted, and I think well worth the price. It couldn't have been better.

The sauce, on the other hand, was a complete failure. On the one hand, it would have been a crime to cover the taste of the lamb with any kind of sauce. Really, I should have thought of that. On the other, the sauce itself wasn't that good. I didn't like the briny taste of the peppercorn, and I might have reduced the madeira too much because I thought it was almost bitter. Fortunately, I had the good sense of only putting a little bit on my plate.

Dinner ended with two desserts. I made a Low sugar apple-sauce for my dad, and everyone ended up loving it. It's made with apple juice concentrate instead of sugar - but apples still have a lot of natural sugars, so it's still not the best.

I also made Cornmeal cake with buttermilk ice cream. I don't think this dessert was as popular as the other one, but I personally liked it very much. The cake was sweet and a tad dry, but the ice cream added the moisture it needed. They both definitely compliment each other very much - neither is as good by itself. The buttermilk ice cream was pretty good - it had great consistency, very creamy though dense (and not at all crystally), and its lemony taste is reminiscent of cheesecake. It's definitely a dessert I'd recommend.

I had planned on serving hot chocolate with speculoos, a Belgian spice cookie I'd made the day before. IMHO, the speculoos were great, and the kids themselves loved them - but Lola didn't seem to be very impressed. A couple of people ate one, but most of us were too full from dinner. I did leave some for Santa, who ate at least one :-)

And that was dinner. We had a Treana viognier/marsanne wine with the earlier part of the meal and a Deloach Zinfandel with the latter part. The white was better than the red.-

In the last few weeks I've been cooking ethnic food on a semi-daily basis. I would like to get through the C's by early next year, which means I need to hurry. The latest menus are:

Cantabrian (a region of Spain)
Chihuahuan (a region of Mexico)
Cowboy

It's available at http://www.marga.org/food/int/canton/

My house is a mess. Always. Every day. No matter how much I clean, it's always a mess. I say this as way of explanation of why I haven't, and don't see myself hosting dinner parties in the near future. I just can't manage to both clean the house and have people over all in the same day.

I have, on the other hand, been very much in a cooking mode lately - so I've gone back to my international food project -, only now I'm following it by cooking single dinner dishes for my family. It makes it a little difficult to come up with a full menu - appetizers, main dishes, sides and dessert - but some of the cuisines I'm cooking don't really lend themselves to mutli-course dinners anyway. I am hoping that by making the project part of my everyday cooking, I will start advancing it on it more quickly than in the past. After all, it's taken me 8 years just to do 2 letters.

This past week I've cooked Balti cuisine and Caucasian cuisine. The former is a style of food cooking and serving created by Indian cooks in England - as far as I can gather, it's very similar to what we get at Indian restaurants in the US. Next on the menu are Cantonese dishes - my first foray ever into Chinese food. I'll also be cooking a couple of Awadhi dishes and may indeed go back to some "A" cuisines for which I didn't have enough recipes to make a full meal.

Balti Menu
Caucasian Menu

Last night I made Canarian food for my little family. We had oven-baked potatoes, a very nice braised chicken with onions and an almost healthy banana pudding. The recipes are up at:

http://www.marga.org/food/int/canary/

My 2-dish Burkinabe menu is now available at:

http://www.marga.org/food/int/burkina/

I've posted three new menus in my website. The Calabrian one includes food I'd cooked a couple of months ago, while I only made the Cameroonian one last Sunday (as I made the boeuf bourguignon).

Burgundy
Calabria
Cameroon

Yesterday was Mika's 6th birthday parties. She had 5 friends over, as well as her 3 yo sister. I don't want to tell you the mess they made! But hey, that's for Mike (mostly) to clean up! They did have the time of their lives, though.

The party included dinner, and Mika wanted the main dish to be apple chicken sausage. This is what else I served:

-carrots with ranch sauce
-cubed Monterey Jack cheese (went over very well)
-laughing cow cheese (they didn't like it much)

-Ardell's apple chicken sausage, sliced
-cheese tortellini with butter (and grated cheese for those who wanted it)
-fruit salad

-popcorn

-cake

It all went over pretty well. I didn't feel bad that I was feeding them too much junk, and the kids enjoyed the food. There was a lot of waste, of course, and also a lot of leftovers.

Yesterday, my friends Lotty, Vienna, Frank and Regina came over for tea. We get together every month for tea, sometimes at someone's house, and sometimes at a tea house. It's a way to keep in touch while enjoying a tradition we all grew up with in our different countries.

This time I prepared a simpler menu than usual:

Available at:

http://www.marga.org/food/int/bahrain/

http://www.marga.org/food/int/brunei/

http://www.marga.org/food/int/acadia/

I've just posted my entire Burmese Menu based on dishes I cooked over three nights. I wasn't awed by the food, but it was satisfying.

Last night our friends Desiree and Grant came over for dinner and I made a Brazilian meal. It had been a while since I'd had a dinner party and made one of my international dinners, and I was very happy to do it again - even though I find cooking so many dishes at once pretty stressful.

The Brazilian menu turned out great, fortunately - and I'm now looking forward to the next international meal I'll cook.

I've posted my one-dish menu for Burundian food here. It was an unsuccesful dinner, with a dish that was very unflavorful.

Anyone who wants to comment about it can do so here.

In Argentina, like in many Latin American countries, the big Christmas celebration happens on Christmas Eve. While I've lived in the US well over 20 years now, for me Christmas Eve will always be the time to be with friends and family and celebrate the wonder of life.

This year we were happy to have, in addition to our best friends Lola and Iggy - with whom we always spend Christmas eve - our friends Eddie and Arthur. They've become some of our best friends in San Leandro, and who knows, spending Christmas Eve with us may just become a tradition (if they don't move back to Texas first).

My menu was very similar to the one I served on Christmas 2004, the last Xmas we spent in the US. Last year we were traveling in Argentina and ate at hotel in the tiny town of Cachi. But the 2004 menu had been so good, that I didn't really want to change it. So I served:

A sliced baguette with olive oil, European butter, smoked salmon, hummus and roasted pepper sauce.

As you can expect, the smoked salmon quickly disappeared - but so did the bread. Camila couldn't get enough of spreading the butter on the bread. She ate the center of the bread, but left the crust behind. Mika loves dipping bread in olive oil, and was quite excited to be able to do it again. Unfortunately (for her), the olive oil was the generic kind, and not the orange olive oil we tasted while shopping a couple of weeks back.

Mixed Greens Salad with Gorgonzola Vinaigrette

This is a favorite of Mikes, and it's so good that I usually serve it when I need to make a salad. Even Lola who dislikes blue cheese - and Kathy who dislikes cheese in general - like it here. This time I used red currants instead of cranberries (I had them at hand) and Lola thought they were an improvement.

Les Halles Mushroom Soup

Once again this was a winner. Iggy, specially, raved about it. This time I added extra morels and some porcini so everyone could get their fill. I imagine I'll make this again next year.

Leek and Camembert Tart

Another winner from epicurious. This was everybody's favorite of the evening. I plan to make it again, but next time I won't try to make it into a circle, I don't think there is much to be gained by that. A recipe was enough for 8 people but I'm sure everyone would have liked seconds.

Prime Rib with Cabernet Jus

This time I used Costco Prime Rib, prime ($11 lb), and while it was good it wasn't nearly as good as the one I made last time ($16 lb) with meat from Galvan's Market. Live and learn. I think next year I'll make lamb or something different.

The cab jus was good but unnecessary.

Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes

Always a winner, and they reheat so easily. I did make too much, though (3 times the recipe). Next time I'll just double it :)

Green beans almondine

Also a popular choice. This recipe is very simple and produces quite a good result - and shocking the green beans gives them a beautiful bright green color.

Dessert was a chocolate cake that Eddie brought (very, very yummy) and Costco pumpkin pie, which was also quite good.

We had several bottles of wine, all very good, but the clear winner of the evening was the Bonny Doon Muscat, Vin de Glaciere. It was impossibly delicious, and I don't even like Muscat. If it wasn't Christmas day, I'd send Mike in search of another bottle.

In all, we had a great Christmas Eve dinner. The kids played wonderfully in the other room, and then even ate some meat (as they knew dessert was coming). The babies were calm and friendly, and the company could not have been better.

Last evening we hosted a Hanukkah/Holiday party for our closest friends. I like to have parties to which I invite all my friends, but our house is too small to accommodate more than a small number of people - specially now that most of our friends have kids.

I wanted to make a very simple menu for the party, 'cause I didn't want to spend all my day in the kitchen as I'm prone to do. So I figured I'd cater it 'a la costco. But then I talked to someone who had thrown a party the week before and told me they'd spent the whole day putting appetizers in and out of the oven - and that didn't sound so appealing either. Finally, someone told me that brisket and donuts were traditional Hanukkah dishes, and suddenly my whole menu appeared before my eyes. I served

-pita bread (supermarket - 1 package eaten, mostly by the babies who loved it)
-artisan bread (costco, quite yummy)
-baby carrots (a kid favorite)

-creme herbed cheese
-roasted pepper dip (I loved it, but it wasn't as popular with others)
-hummus (from Costco, very good)
-ranch dressing

-latkes with sour cream and apple sauce

I used this recipe for latkes as a base, but I didn't want to bother washing and drying the potatoes, so I just mixed them with the egg and onion as I shredded them. That was really a mistake, because onions have a LOT of liquid. So I'd recommend drying them, even if you don't wash them, before mixing them in. It wasn't an unfixable mistake, however. I just added a bit of flour and squeezed out the liquid from the latkes as I put them in. I also added considerably more salt than the recipe asked for. They turned out very, very, very yummy. They were definitely a favorite with the kids, but also with the adults. They disappeared quickly. Fortunately my friend Arthur brought more (to make at my house) - so everyone got to have as many latkes as they wanted.

BTW, I didn't find making latkes to be as much of a pain as other people say. I was surprised at how easy it was to shred the potatoes - it took me just as long as it took Mike to peel them. I hate peeling potatoes myself, but Mike doesn't care so he always does it for me.

Anyway, I'm glad we had latkes for Hanukkah.

-Brisket, made from this recipe. I don't know how Jewish this particular recipe is, but it was amazingly delicious. The braising liquid, in particular, was out of this world. The meat turned out a little bit dry, I think I overcooked it, and next time I make it, I may try a different cut - but lord is the sauce yummy. And it's also VERY easy to make, and all you need is a cutting board, a plate and ONE wide pot. A 4 1/2 lb brisket was enough for everybody (of course, I'd warned them that this wasn't dinner, just hors d'ouvres) and now we have leftovers for lunch!!!!

-Vegetable eggrolls from Costco. They seem popular enough, the kids liked them too. Mike thought they were just OK, though he'd eaten more of them if there weren't other things to eat.

-Quiche from Costco. This proved the least popular thing, I'm not sure if because my guests don't like quiche, or the quiche wasn't that good. Anyway, I'm taking the other one (the package has two) to a potluck next week. And I may bring the already cut one (pre-sliced) to a cookie exchange today. Perhaps with all those cookies people will like something salty.

-Sushi from Costco. People thought it wasn't exciting but good.

And for dessert: doughnuts. I got 2 bakers dozens ($6 each at Safeway, not a bad deal), but we only went through 14 donuts or so.

The party itself was very nice, the kids had a lot of fun playing together, the babies behaved quite well, and the adults could chat comfortably. It was great!

Now it's time to prepare for Xmas Eve dinner next week, I hope to have the energy to do it.

I've finally decided what to make for Thanksgiving. Here is my menu:

-Bread with olive oil, white balsamic vinegar & cream cheese
-Braised Chicken with bacon & bread stuffing (325, 2 hours)
-Traditional green beans casserole (350, 25')
-Mashed potatoes
-Chevy's corn tomalito (250, 2 hours)
-Persimmon bread (350, 1 hour)
-Apple pie

I want to have a semi-traditional thanksgiving, so that my 4-yo can start appreciating traditions, but I'm not a big fan of turkey. Plus, our friends Lola and Iggy will be coming to dinner after having a traditional Thanksgiving dinner at their family's, so I want to offer them something somewhat different. Any suggestions/comments?

I've finally put up my Bosnian Menu. I cooked the meal what now seems like ages ago, and had my friends Parker and Donovan over. The food was pretty good, and we all had a great time.

Comments on my Bosnian menu can be left here and they will be linked from the Bosnian Menu page.

Mike - my husband, that is - is running for School Board in San Leandro (check out his website) and he's having a kickoff party next Thursday evening. If you're a San Leandran, or even if you're not, you are welcomed to come. It'll be from 7-8:30 PM at Zocalo.

Anyway, I'm in charge of the menu, and this is what I'm planning to serve so far:

-Meat empanadas
-Mini quiches
-Crudites
-Fresh fruit
-Cookies
-Fish crackers (for the kids)

I may also make pinwheel sandwiches, but I think I probably have enough with the stuff above. Plus I don't want to over-extend myself either. After all, it's about him, not the food :) That said, he LOVES deviled eggs, so I may make those as well.

Yesterday we had a BBQ at our house. It was a great excuse to clean up our patio (finally!) and have friends over. In particular, we hadn't seen Ralph and Ruth for a year, I have to make sure to invite them over for dinner soon. Well, not too soon, I don't think Mike can handle more than one dinner event per month.

I wanted a complete no-work menu (no work for me, that is, Mike still had to do the grilling :) so I settled for:

-Chips & dip (storebought)
-Red Potato Salad
which I like 'cause I don't have to peel the potatoes to make it.
-Apple & chicken sausages
which I found out are not very good on hot dog buns
-Tri-tip
I sprinkled kosher salt on it, let it rest for a couple of hours, and it was absolutely delicious. Like all my beef, I bought it at Costco.
-Apple pie
from costco
-Dreyer's Ice Cream
which Ralph appreciated as he works there

Ralph brought some Chinese sausage and some salchichas, and both were wonderful. Sandra brought some very popular green salad.

All in all we had a wonderful, relaxed time in the patio, and now that it's clean I'm planning to entertain there more often - plus start grilling a lot of food. Meanwhile I have 3 lbs of sausages to get through.

I cooked my Belizean dinner sooo long ago that I can't even recall it, but for some reason I never put it up on my website. Yesterday, as I was exporting my food pictures to flickr, I came across the ones from Belize and realized my omission. Apparently the Belizean food I'd cooked hadn't been very good, but it still needs to be up. You can find the menu here

I have finally finished cooking the Bhutanese dishes I proposed to make months ago. It took me such a long time because I was actually fearing making them - hearing the heat (which made me seed the peppers in a couple of recipes) and the potential blandness. After all, how good can dishes with such few ingredients and no herbs or spices taste? I foud out - pretty darn good. Once again (it happened to me with Albanian and Belarussian cuisine before) my prejudices have been shown to be baseless.

The dish I cooked last night, a beef with mushroom curry, was particularly good so much so that I can imagine making it again for company. It was my first time cooking oyster mushrooms and I have to say I loved their texture, I'll certainly use them again.

The menu is at http://www.marga.org/food/int/bhutan/

My Halloween party is over and the menu and recipes are now available in my website. You can find them at http://www.marga.org/food/party/hallow04/

These include the recipes below plus a recipe for chili con carne and one for meat empanadas.

A couple of months after I actually cooked it, my Bermudian menu is online. It features recipes for fish chowder, pienapple spareribs, coconut rice and banana pie.

Though it hapenned over a month ago, I figure I should write about the great Bourguignone dinner that never was before I delete the menu from the "next on the menu" section and have it disappear forever.

I had invited my friends Alistair and Suzanna to dinner a week after I had Eddie & Arthur over for a Bermudian dinner. Sometimes I get overly ambitious which proves to be a mistake. I decided to skip on the other "B" cuisines and go directly to Burgundian because I wasn't confident on the recipes I had for the other cuisines. With only a week to prepare, I didn't have enough time to research enough to be confident that the Bolivian or Bhutanese menu I'd prepare be both enjoyable and manageable.

It was not as easy to come up with a Burgundian menu as I first thought. It was a given that I'd serve Beef Bourguignonne as a main dish, but finding appetizers was harder. I didn't want to repeat the same ingredients on different dishes, which meant no mushrooms in the appetizer and no cheese as I wanted to serve a cheese course. That finally didn't happen so I decided on some cheese pastries. Dessert was even more difficult, I couldn't find anything suitable save a bread pudding (Mike hates bread pudding) and decided to serve strawberries in wine as we were in strawberry season, though I wasn't very confident on them. I never could find any vegetables to serve.

The dinner didn't come out great. The store-bought pate de campagne was great (oh, how I'll miss pate for the next few months!), but I don't think Mike liked the eggs dijon style. I couldn't quite figure out how the Burgundian cheese pastries were supposed to be, but they sounded like empanadas so I used empanada shells, the cheese filling was OK but not as good as plain cheese.

The braised Boeuf Bourguignone should have been great, and it would have been if I hadn't let it run out of liquid in the oven. I tried to save it by adding more wine (Cab, I didn't have any burgundy left) and stewing it for a while, but it wasn't that great that night. The next day, though, it was like mana from heaven, soooo delicious, convincing me that next time I make it I have to let it rest for a day.

I never found the Burgundian cheeses and never got to dessert, probably a good thing.

For alas, not only did my dinner fail but my guests forgot to come! They are also new parents and the invitation had been extended a month before, so it was easy to understand how they could forget. I have to admit that as much as I wanted to see them, I wasn't completely upset that they didn't make it - this was not a meal I was proud to serve.

I'm planning to cook another Burgundian dinner when I get to it, so this menu won't go on my webpage. Here I leave it just as a memory:

Burgundian food
Pate de Campagne
with Cornichons
Eggs Dijon Style
with mixed greens
Cheese pastries
Beef Bourguignonne
with egg noodles
Vanilla Ice Cream
with Strawberries in Wine

Burgundian food
Pate de Campagne
with Cornichons
Eggs Dijon Style
with mixed greens
Cheese pastries
Beef Bourguignonne
with egg noodles
Vanilla Ice Cream
with Strawberries in Wine

Menu - Michaela's BD party - version 2 ( after initial round of shopping)

The menu hasn't changed much, with the exception of the salad (couldn't find arugula at Safeway yesterday, so I'm going with a mixed green salad).

Potato Chips
Tortilla chips
Baby Carrots
Steamed Broccoli
Baguettes

Guacamole
Salsa
Sour cream
Dip (storebought)
Cream Cheese

Mini P&J sandwiches

Provoletas on Bread

Chicken Satay
Tofu Satay
Beef Anticuchos
Mango Sausages
Grilled Portobello Mushrooms

Potato Salad
Mixed Green Salad with Gorgonzola Vinaigrette

Birthday Cake
Ice cream cake
Ice Cream

Sodas
Juices
Beer
White Wine