"party food" news and stories

This Saturday, a friend of mine celebrated her small summer wedding with a large fall party for all their friends and family. They borrowed a house on the New Jersey shore, pitched a very large tent and brought in tons of food from a local Trinidadian restaurant. Being the eco-friendly couple that they are, they chose to serve mostly vegan food, knowing that mass-produced meat and poultry are environmentally irresponsible.

I had never really experienced much in the way of imitation meat before, when I found myself confronted with an array of faux chicken legs (in mango or tamari sauces) and seitan spare ribs. I tried it all. The faux chicken legs were unnerving at first, because as I cut into mine, my knife hit something hard in the center. Inside was a thin wooden skewer, representing the bone. The texture was so similar to shredded chicken that my brain and taste buds kept checking in with each other, trying to figure out what exactly was going on. The seitan spare ribs were tasty, but I tend to be sensitive to too much wheat and so after a few bites, my stomach started to protest.

I'm impressed with the creativity that people possess that leads them to conjure up workable meat substitutes. However, I think that I'd prefer to have a meat-free meal than one where the main dish was one built on fake meat. How do the rest of you feel? Fake meat or no meat at all?

I'm not really sure what to make of this recipe from iconic British Australian comedienne (comedian?) Dame Edna. It's for Aftermath Quiche ("Aftermath" as in what you should eat the morning after a late night party), but some of the instructions are rather vague. "Assorted canapes and party leftovers in general?" What exactly does that mean? Can I throw in vegetables? Party dip? Leftover chili? Candy corn?

Looks interesting though. Full recipe after the jump (and check out the other cool celebrity recipes at Frank DeCaro's site).

Awhile back I told you about a really great book titled Fashionable Food. It details the history of food decade by decade, and includes a lot of cool recipes. I'll be highlighting some of the more interesting recipes from the book, and today it's Porkers.

This recipe is from the 1960s and was originally in the book How To Keep Him (After You've Caught Him) - I guess it was for the ladies. It uses Saltine crackers and bacon and...well, that's it actually. Mmmmm ... bacon. Full recipe after the jump.

When I first laid eyes on a Sloppy Joe, I was about 5. I had no idea what it was and my parents had certainly never tried to serve one to me. A Sloppy Joe is essentially ground meat cooked in a skillet with a tomato based sauce and tastes more like a chopped up hamburger drowning in ketchup than the pasta-topping meat sauce it is related to. In fact, I'm fairly certain that the first one I ever had was simply ground meat in ketchup - a combination likely to win the heart of any 5-year-old. Another big selling point was the fact that it made for messy eating, hence the name.

I've had a love affair with tapas from long before I ever set foot in Spain (for the record: April 29, 2003. Madrid. Honeymoon. Met or exceeded expectations). I first started noshing on shrimp and romesco sauce, blue cheese-stuffed olives, and little toasts with jamon serrano when I was still just a budding gourmet in my early 20s. Tapas first entered my life in a party, and I feel that nothing says cocktail food so much as a good tapas spread.

I can't recommend these salty Spanish bites enough as the menu for your New Year's party (whether it's for a formally-dressed crowd or just one or two in your jammies with a good bottle of bubbly). They are easy to make at the last minute ('cause if you're like me you haven't planned, much), they don't require much in the way of recipes or thought, they're highly-flavored, they're often packed with protein to counteract the effects of your tipplin' ways. They're pretty, too.