Christmas Dinner With Our Friends – Appetizers And Drinks

My previous post covered the salad and the lasagna main course for our Christmas meal and today I’ll show our appetizers.

I'll begin with two kinds of hummas using a recipe from Gimme Some Oven for the first one. You can visit Ali’s site by clicking on the link for the original recipe, a how to video, and more shots like this one.

Christmas Dinner With Our Friends – Our Version Of Italian

Our original plan for Christmas dinner was to do as little as possible but then we decided to invite a few folks over who might otherwise be eating alone and when all the invitations were issued, we had 12 diners.  However, doing as little as possible was still a priority but the definition of “little” changed somewhat.

Merry Christmas Everyone

Here are Bev and Pat making Italian Crème Cake for our Christmas in Italy dinner.  I'd spent the day making lasagna sauce so the kitchen was trashed.

Photos can be enlarged by clicking on them and the blue words are links.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by Almost Heaven South.

Larry

12/22/19 event date

15 Bean Soup with Ham

As I’d mentioned in an earlier post, there are five blue zones in the world where people have much greater longevity and one of the reasons appears to be their diet and they all include lot’s of beans.  I’ve had a bag of  dried 15 Bean Mix in the pantry for a few years  and decided this was a great time to put it to use – Bev is already saying we should eat beans every day.  I went off in search of a recipe that was more than just our normal soup beans and found one from one of my go-to bloggers - Tricia at Saving Room For Dessert.  I adapted it a little to suit the ingredients I had on hand but you can check her site for the original recipe and her usual great pics like this one. 

Chicken Wild Rice Casserole – Ala Tricia

I have several blogger buddies who I consider my go-to’s for reliably good recipes (you know who you are) and when I saw this dish on Tricia’s Saving Room For Dessert blog, I knew it had to be tried as it looked delicious, was pretty simple, and fairly healthy.  I just followed the recipe from her site, which also included some great pics like the one below.

Paprikás Csirke - Chicken Paprikash – Paprika Chicken

While my girls were in Florida, I got to thinking about the meals we eat and realized we stay pretty close to home and I thought we should branch out.  So I divided the world into five areas (excluding North America), picked five 5-7 countries from each and found a signature dish from each country – the areas are Africa, Asian mainland, Europe, South/Central America, Pacific Islands.

My goal is to cook a dish from a different country each week and I picked Europe – Hungary – Chicken Paprikish with Nokedi (dumplings) for the first one.  I read many recipes for the chicken and finally settled on one from the Daring Gourmet for the chicken and a recipe from Food.com forthe dumplings.  Here is a shot of the chicken from the Daring Gourmet website which has many how-to pics and a shot from the web for the dumplings.

Salisbury Steak Ala Tuffy Stone

Most of you likely do not follow competitive barbecue but I have over the years and one of the real all-stars is Tuffy Stone who has a highly successful BBQ team (41 Grand Championships), a restaurant in Richmond, VA, a cooking school, and he has professional culinary training – he’s much more than just a BBQ cook.  So when I got an email from Thermoworks that included Tuffy's recipe for Salisbury Steak, I knew it had to be tried and our neighbor’s had to be invited for one of Steve’s favorite meals – they provided the meat from one of their beefs.  Click on this recipe link for some good how-to photos like this one.

Baked Salmon and Dill Sauce, Blue Zones

The girls were back from Florida, I was ready for fish, and I discovered a whole Sockeye Salmon filet in the freezer – Bev, Cindy, and I all enjoy salmon.  While I like to cook salmon on the grill, it was clean and covered plus it was cold outside and we had a fire in the fireplace so I decided to cook it inside and went in search of an oven-cooked recipe, finding one from Taste Of Home that I liked and modified to get the simple one below.

The Girls Last Day I Paradise & Beautiful Sky

Friday was the girls last day in paradise and it was Cindy’s birthday so they had a celebration breakfast of fried potatoes and eggs, sliced pear, and avocado – I’d eat that.

A Really Good Salad

Just like beauty, this is very much in the eyes of the beholder and applies to many dishes.  From garden to chicken to potato or ambrosia the word salad applies to a great variety of dishes but for me unless proceeded by an adjective such as tuna, the word salad means greens, other stuff, and dressing.

For this meal, I wanted what I will call a Mediterranean salad which consisted of romaine lettuce, cukes, onion, red pepper, celery, carrots, olives, anchovies, and feta cheese.  When I was growing up, my parents exposed me to a lot of foods with some I didn’t like (oysters) and others I did like (anchovies) which I’ve yet to figure out why Bev doesn't like on salad – I now also love oysters.  Shot from the web.

Cioppino - Seafood Stew

I have been wanting to make Cioppino or Bouillabaissse for a long time but I knew neither Bev or Pat (SIL) would have anything to do with it (it’s basically boiled fish), so I decided to make it while they were in Florida and invite some friends over to help me eat it.  There are lot’s of different recipes but I opted for one from All Recipes as it was pretty simple and sounded very good.  Since it makes 13 servings, I cut it in half and changed the seafood a little for what I like to get the recipe below.