Showing posts with label dinner parties. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dinner parties. Show all posts

Monday, 22 June 2009

cold weather curries

It's really cold, do you know what I need a lot of? Curry!

Months ago we hosted a curry party / curry potluck at our place, about which I never managed to blog. So now that I am very cold today, I am trying to warm myself up and I am thinking about curry! It was sweltering in our front room, eight of us crammed in mid-January, it was warm and we had to open all the windows and take breaks to go outside, where we were bitten by mozzies but we weren't so tightly packed.

thai-ish green curry by msh

Everybody brought a random vegan curry, above is some sort of thai-ish green curry by Msh (please ignore the milk in the photo, someone thought they'd need it to combat spiciness).

pineapple and mango curry by matthias

Matthias made a fragrant pineapple and mango curry, he loves sweet and spicy sorts of Carribean curries.

something japanese inspired by stephen

Stephen rocked in with this delicious, very hearty and thick Japanese-inspired curry, more like a stew but still really great.

"chicken" kapitan

I provided some laksa and some kapitan, easy and familiar and delicious.

I really want some curry now.

Tuesday, 16 June 2009

a weekend getaway of in-house noms

Went down South to Eagle Bay for the weekend, it was awesome.

The plan for the weekend was to hang out with fabulous friends, play games, and eat a lot of food, and that is exactly what we did.

We started our long weekend of noms on Thursday evening, with some pizza. Gilli made the pizza base in Perth, and it rose on the drive down. We ended up with four pizzas, two vegan and two not-vegan.
Our pizzas were delicious, I love a good home made pizza. Gilli had made two different types of base, one herbed and one plain, and we covered them with awesome things like pumpkin, fresh basil, and avocado. We also had this amazing tomato and cashew pesto that Greg had picked up from a craft fair earlier this year, it was a little spicy and delicious on the pizza, and as a spread on bread!

pizza

Friday’s breakfast was all vegan but for the ice-cream. I made pancakes, and Kandace made waffles, and Gilli stewed some apples, which was awesome. We supplemented with banana, golden syrup, and nuttelex. The waffle mix was new, and wasn’t quite viscous enough to work properly in the waffle maker, but it was still awesome!

breakfast #1: pancakes and waffles

At lunch we went to Samudra, a vegetarian restaurant in Dunsborough. Review to follow! (It was delicious) ETA review here.

Friday dinner was a roasted extravaganza, featuring roast pumpkin, roast potato, roast sweet potato, roasted carrot, roast mushrooms and roasted beetroot. Roasted mushrooms are amazing. Amazing! They were field mushrooms, stems removed, sprinkled with oregano and parsley and some other herbs, and I am absolutely going to roast mushrooms from now on. It also included beans, peas, carrots, and one of those Sanitarium roast things.

dinner #2: roast

On Saturday morning Greg and I baked jam thumbprint cookies and lemon and poppy seed muffins. Of course, this delayed breakfast somewhat, but it was worth it.

lemon and poppy seed cupcakes

We finally started cooking a massive fry up for breakfast, including hashbrowns, sausages (vegan and not), toast, tomatoes, mushrooms, and sweet potato hash browns. There was also tea, and jam, and more of the awesome pesto, which featured heavily throughout the weekend.

breakfast #2

The sweet potato hash browns were an experiment, and it wasn’t until I started googling that I discovered ‘hash’ means so many different cooking related things! But we wanted hashbrowns, delicious fried flat goodness, and they were fantastic, crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. The recipe needs some tweaking, but in general we boiled the potato (peeled and diced) until it was soft but not super soft, then roughly mashed with five tablespoons of plain flour, combined them into cakes and fried them in the frypan for a few minutes. Incredibly delicious!

sweet potato patties

Saturday dinner was nachos and tacos, simple and fun. I like seeing what toppings people pick.

dinner #3

In preparation for Sunday breakfast, late Saturday night I cooked a pumpkin saag and some dahl. The dahl was my usual recipe, which I know without looking and is so tasty, so my favourite. The saag was an attempt at the pumpkin saag from Veganomicon, but we’d left the recipe on the kitchen counter at home and so I worked from memory. I added a sliced chilli, seeds out, to give it some flavour, and forgot the cinnamon and whatever dried herbs go in it, and I added garlic and ginger. It was different, but still tasty. We served the curry with roti and rice.

breakfast #3

Before we left on Sunday afternoon, more baking was to be had, for the trip back to Perth, and I made a whole lot of sushi.

An awesome weekend of noms. D and I were also very appreciative of our friends, not just for their awesomeness in general, but for their awesomeness in ensuring strict separation between vegan implements and non-vegan implements, to minimise cross-contamination.

Warp speed, Mr Sulu

If you are interested in photos of other parts of our weekend, you can find them here

Sunday, 31 May 2009

out and about with gilli and dr g

One of the things that D and I lament is that now that we have such specific food requirements, our invitations to people's houses seems to have dropped a little. So it is always with much joyful anticipation that we accept offers to hang out with people, especially people we like as much as we like Gilli and Dr Greg!

We were treated to a wonderful three courses of mostly home-made delights. We commenced with spring rolls (not homemade) as we sat around and chatted.

spring rolls

We migrated towards the table and continued on with baked polenta and a mushroom ragout. The polenta was very interesting, I've not had baked polenta before and I was intrigued by its sort-of solid consistency. It seems like the sort of thing that likes to soak up liquid. The mushroom ragout was awesome. This was served with a side of their amazing roasted salad, featuring roasted pumpkin and fried pinenuts (which were so good).

baked polenta and a mushroom ragout

We rounded the meal out with berry agar-agar jelly hearts, two-fruits, and a delicious banana and passionfruit sorbet made by Gilli. I love homemade sorbet, it is awesome. I particularly liked the hearts - more foods should be great shapes!

dessert of your heart

It was a great night out, I love visiting friends! In between courses we paused for chats, tea, and board games. We played a game of Blokus (which I won) and a game of MOUSETRAP. It has been years since I've played Mousetrap, so that was a bit interesting. The game itself is sadly not as engaging as I remembered, perhaps because I am now much older than I was when I coveted it.