Inspired by Pixilated’s thread wherein is the following lovely sentence, “Tonight I made a nice Apple-Bourbon pork loin with rice and green beans” —
I would like to ask everyone:
What is the most deliciously successful meal you have ever made for guests?
Salmon and tuna sushi (rolls and nigiri), with some takoyaki (baked octopus balls). It wasn’t restaurant quality, but people said they liked it!
Wow, Autolycus, the mind just boggles! Both because “baked octopus balls” sounds so exotic, and because it sets up so many excellent one-liners!
Seriously, what’s in them? I love love love sushi.
Here’s a link to takoyaki. Mine are simpler though, just a piece of octopus, the batter, and Japanese mayonnaise. One of these days I’ll have to try making it with all the other ingredients.
A month or two ago I painstakingly prepared pollo pibil. I ground the achiote paste myself, marinated the chicken, and wrapped it all in banana leaves (much harder than it sounds). I served it with refried black beans and rice. It was easily one of the most beautiful things I ever made. Not as good as I had in Mexico, but it was damn tasty.
Queen Bruin, sounds wicked good! I had to go look that one up, too. And wound up at a page of Yucatecan cuisine. Mexico isn’t that far from Oakland – I wonder how long it would take me on a bicycle?
A long time, but there’d be a lot of great food along the way!
Couple years ago I was able to buy some of prime grade flank steaks. I grilled them just right, added some saute’d peppers and onions and we had the best tasting fajitas ever. I have tried to duplicate it a couple times since, they have been good but not the same as with the prime grade meat.
Last June I bought a whole beef loin and butchered it myself. Among other things I cut 4 steaks nearly a thick as they were wide. I carefully rubbed them with garlic and heavily salted them with sea salt. I started them in a 200 degree oven for 20 minutes and then seared them on the grill over an all hickory wood fire. They came out perfectly medium rare, with a great crust, a light smoke flavor and so tender we used butter knives. Served with a mixed green salad, baked potatoes and a loaf of my wife’s home made sourdough bread, it was a very simple steak dinner. Our guests raved and I’ve always felt is was just so decadent cutting my own steaks from the loin primal. Next I want to try dry aging a strip steak primal and then cutting nice 2 inch thick steaks for an upscale grill party for my 40th.
Me, too - I’m devoted to it. My attempts to prepare it at home have unfortunately been only moderately successful.
I’ve been using a variant of the no-knead bread recipe for about a year, and can now turn out homemade loaves that consistently get rave reviews. One is on the rise at this moment.
One summer I decided I needed to make pulled pork. Real, Southern pulled pork (note my location). I asked my friend from Georgia to tell me how, and he rattled off some instructions over IM and I wrote them on a scrap piece of paper. Come pork day, I followed the directions to a “t”, including getting the right buns, making coleslaw and having pickle slices. And of course the right sauce.
My Georgia friend’s parents were up visiting from Georgia so they came by for pork day. I let my friend do the pulling. It turned out GREAT and his folks said it was one of the best pulled pork dinners they’d ever had. Not one “bless your heart” or anything.
It was definitely a culinary triumph for this Cleveland girl to present a perfectly smoked pork shoulder to a family of Dawgs.
I have, several times, made chicken baked in a salt crust. You start out with rock salt, mixed with egg white and water to make a snow-like slurry, then mound it over and around the chicken and roast the whole mess together. Recipe taken from one of the Culinary Institute of America cookbooks.
It’s spectacular to pull that thing out of the oven. It requires weapons to crack the salt crust (seriously. I had to give it a few solid whacks with a sharpening steel to crack the crust) and extricate the chicken.
The chicken meat is gloriously flavorful and moist.
Sure, the cleanup is a bitch - salt that has been egg-white-coated and baked apparently loses all water solubility.
The other dish I make that gets oohs and ahs is the brined turkey (recipe posted elsewhere on the board).
My better half makes the world’s best eggrolls. They’re stuffed with sausage, shrimp, bean sprouts and cilantro. Precook the stuffing, roll 'em up, then deep-fry. Serve with Chinese-style sweet chili sauce. Not for those who must control cholesterol intake.
There’s a recipe in Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cooking that I can’t remember the name of now, but involves making 2 different spice pastes and using them to cover a fryer chicken. Wrap the entire thing in 2 pieces of foil and bake. It’s incredible, but it takes me forever to make (those damned delicious spice pastes) so I haven’t made it since I had kids. My husband’s still taking about it.
Another amazing time-consuming recipe was a stuffed poblano recipe from Saveur magazine, which involved roasting poblanos and stuffing them with a meat-almond mixture. Awesome. Yet another recipe that will have to wait for the kids to get older.
Not an entire meal, but I am still proud of how pretty my italian bread turned out: Pretty bread
Susan
the dive master makes a shrimp and sausage jambalaya that doesn’t make for much in the way of leftovers. a while back we served it for movie night (the traveling movie/food party that moves from house to house amongst our cadre of community theater folk). i caught guests trying to climb inside the pot. 
he also knows how to prepare seared fresh tuna steaks with plum sauce.
to die for!
i don’t make much of anything except for my sister’s hot chicken recipe. that particular dish disappears quicker than slim jims at a truck stop.
Not for guests, but I totally free-styled some cod the other night for Razorette and I. She was working a little late, I was off early, so I started dinner. I started my usual lemon-and-olive oil sauce, but accidentally grabbed the lime bottle instead. Too tart. Remembering a few simply lessons my son had taught me, I grabbed the first sweet thing I could find – sugar. But I knew that wasn’t enough. It needed spice. Cinnamon goes with sugar, says I, so in went a dash of cinnamon. Not bad! Dipped the fish in the sauce, rolled in Italian seasoned bread crumbs, into the oven it went. Continung the “sweet” theme, I mixed up some sweet potatoes (out of a box, sorry) then sauteed mixed veggies with a dollop of honey, tossed a spinach and lettuce salad with raspberry vinegarette dressing, served it with a white merlot. Not a bad effort, for a country boy.
Thanks for the move, Cajun Man. I plumb forgot we had a gastronomy section!
Wow, everybody, I’m impressed! There is truly a cosmopolitan spectrum of food here. (And a very pretty bread picture.)
Definitely lots of inspiration for future convivial dining, which is what I was hoping for.
Since we’re on the topic 
, here’s what I found out recently: My mom never breaded anything. She felt it was decadent & fattening. Which may be true, but good pork chops are much better with a breadcrumb coating. The critical thing, I think, is oregano . I know someone who grows it, copiously. A small handful of dried homegrown oregano in the crust is soooo good.
