I am so going to make Eva Luna’s eggplant walnut dish. That sounds incredibly nummy, thanks for posting it!
Holy crap, these sound good! Especially those sweet and spicy nuts: I have an almost religious reverence for maple syrup, so I’m going to make those and eat them every day for the rest of my life. THe beet salad is extremely weird-sounding, but then I’m highly skeptical of beets; it just might be the ticket for convincing me beets are worth eating. I’ll definitely try it. And I know burundi, being the eggplant fanatic she is, will make and eat the eggplant dish lots; I’m thinking I just might be able to choke down a serving or two myself ;).
Thanks lots, guys – these are great!
Daniel
Globe grapes stuffed with chevre (goat cheese).
Grab a bunch of globe grapes (they are extra-large and quite spherical). Cut the top 1/3 off each grape. Use a very small spoon (such as a 1/4 tsp measuring spoon) to scoop out the seeds and make a small hollow space. Place a chunk of goat cheese in each grape.
Nummy.
Check out “Martha Stewart’s Hor D’oevres Handbook” it is a truly remarkable book and not all the ideas are fussy.
A perfectly brilliant idea from that book is to serve a “sip” of gazpacho (cold vegetable soup) in a cup made from a 2" section of cucumber with some of the seeds scooped out.
An idea for a dish/centerpiece/alternative to a boring tray of raw veggies: The Bouquet of Veggies.
Made by taking half a cabbage, placing it in a bowl or basket or large vase(deep is better) sticking lots of wooden skewers in it and top each skewer with a veggie “flower”
Warning: it is somewhat time consuming, and can’t be made much ahead of time, or the veggies will become limp.
Other warning: Many guests claimed it was too pretty to eat. We ended up with way too many veggies left over. Of course, I think we put more veggies in the bouquet than we would have served on a tray, so that may be a factor.
MY SIL put mushrooms on skewers, and put olives or cherry tomatos on for centers. She cut “petals” in lots of carrots (from a bag of baby-cut carrots).
To increase the flower look, the outer most skewers should be green- made by taking green onion stems and sliding a skewer up it. My mother cut petals in grape tomatos, but I think you could get away with just sticking whole tomatoes on the skewers.
The white part of the green onions, plus a couple of inches of green was cut to be fringed and stuck on skewers. I think broccoli flowerets were used, you could probably use cauliflower as well.
Pieces of red and green pepper were also used, sort of resembled leaves, I think. Pea pods were stuck on toothpicks around the base to help conceal the skewers.
(Skewers were also trimmed somewhat to end up with variable lengths, so that the bouquet mounded at the top. like flower bouqets do.)
It was the hit of our open house.