Cookie party, the wrap

In the spirit of this year, it’s Tuesday and I’m only just getting to writing about the party that happened on  Saturday.

Originally I thought I’d get all the boxes packed Wednesday to mail Thursday but that didn’t happen. Instead I was up until 2:00 AM Thursday night/Friday morning packing, and mailed on Friday.

I was feeling a bit like I was living a charmed life Friday. First, I got to the post office at just the right time – it wasn’t too crowded and I had two postal workers helping me get all the boxes from my car to the building. Twenty this year.

Before I left to ship the boxes, I cooked the garbanzo beans for the hummus. There’s a step where you mix the olive oil with the tahini, before drizzling it into the food processor where the beans and garlic and lemon juice have already been combined. I was making a double batch and did the math wrong, and mixed in about 4x as much olive oil as I needed into the tahini. But there was something off about that tahini – it wasn’t out of date or anything, but it was bitter. I ate some on toast a few days before and thought so then, too. I thought a little bit about how to re-do the proportions and then decided to measure how much tahini I had in the fresh carton I’d bought and it was just enough. I threw the bitter tahini and too-much oil mixture away, thus saving the hummus. So that was the second charmed life thing. Can’t say everything else went that well, but it was a good start.

We had a work lunch, and I took a tray of cookies.

On Saturday morning I think the most satisfying thing was cutting up all the veggies to go with the dip. I had broccoli, and two kinds of carrots, yellow and orange, and cauliflower, and 3 colors of peppers, and beauty heart radishes from my CSA box. I had to buy extra carrots – it was such a rainy summer, this is the first year in a long time that I didn’t get enough carrots in my end of season CSA “Thanksgiving” box. They were from my CSA farmers, Tipi Produce, just purchased at the co-op.

Here’s what we had at the party:

• Spicey peanut dip and all those pretty veggies
• BBQ pork and BBQ tempeh (a Bryant Terry recipe that’s ridiculously easy) with an oil & vinegar slaw that was also very pretty, purple and green Savoy cabbage, a little bit of red bell pepper, and shallot. I was going to make focaccia to go with it but in the end just put out the big bag of Costco rolls, that ran out pretty fast but lasted as long as the meat and tempeh. I bought three pounds of tempeh thinking I’d make a triple batch, and froze a pound. I guess if I’d made the extra it would’ve outlasted the buns.
• BBQ pickled eggs – a new thing and a keeper. The recipe says to discard the congealed layer of butter & lard from the top of the eggs, and I thought I might save it to spread on bread – but I didn’t. Plus as above, ran out of bread. Next year ….
• Turkey meatballs, that were OK but next year I’m going back to beef
• Bacon dates – stuffed with pecans. Next year I’m trying this.
• Corn salsa, made with frozen corn, roasted poblanos, and roasted tomatoes, all things I’d made last summer, with corn chips
• Ovens of Brittany olive walnut cream cheese to spread on buttered rye bread
• Jacque Pepin’s fromage fort made with the ends of cheese from Thanksgiving – and it was really fort. Lots of garlic
• Caramelized onion dip with potato chips – a big hit with the younger crowd, and all gone – I finished the last dab on wheat thins on Monday night.
• Crackers and cheeses, including a Brie with American Spoon onion jam on top, that I baked in a little dish where it became molten
• Deviled eggs – I did the Anna Alberici recipe with toasted almonds in the yolk mix, and my additions – curry powder, a squeeze of lemon juice, and a little honey.
• Beer steamed shrimp
• Cocktail wieners and kosher dogs in dough
• Salami and various pickles
• Ratatouille (from the freezer) baked with goat cheese
• Clementines, pistachios, Chex mix

And of course a bunch of big platters of cookies.

I re-froze and/or didn’t make a few things. I thawed out some zucchini butter and some pepperonata, and never served them, so re-froze. And had everything ready – parsley pesto, roasted sweet potato, grated cheese, tortillas – but didn’t make the Cafe Flora quesadillas. Oh, and I was going to make a leek confit and roasted butternut squash and goat cheese tart on puff pastry, but didn’t do that either.

It was a well-paced party – crowded and loud and lots of kids early but I still felt like I talked to people, then time to sit and chat with the second wave. I thought I had the space set up well; because of getting painted in November the living room and dining room are both neater than usual. I got rid of A LOT of junk! And I had lots of helpers – Annie made the veggie platters and sliced up the salami, and Megan made the cracker baskets and cut off the rind and spread the jam on the Brie. Susan and Ed washed dishes and helped stuff the deviled eggs, and Annie came back and washed serving platters and loaded the dishwasher at the end. Mark swept the floor.

The donations in the bucket for the real butter, flour, sugar, and shrimp fund covered the cookie box shipping charges with a little over towards ingredients.

And I had a bit of a mom triumph – on Sunday morning I found John’s autographed Frank Thomas baseball by unearthing the giant Tupperware to which his treasures had been transferred, from the bottom of a big stack of stuff in the basement. It was in with the SG-shaped clock he made in high school shop class – with space for a battery – and various other important things, like mint Star Wars & Aliens figures, that he thought might be worth a little money but only $4.64 on e-bay. There was an Orlando Cepeda ball in there too, I guess Jeff made music tapes for Orlando, but John was much less concerned about that one.

Since the party I’ve been giving away cookies – Sunday and Monday the cookie fairy went her rounds, and Tuesday I took a big foil pan to the Goodman food pantry meal. I did make a few more, an extra pan of chocolate toffee bars, that I think (of course) are nicer than the two pans we already went though, some cranberry-orange-walnut-chocolate chippers, and the almond rainbow bars are baked and in the downstairs fridge awaiting their chocolate glaze, although I don’t feel as good about them as I should because I got the green layer really scary dark – forest – too much food coloring.

We’re doing pretty good on leftovers. I made the shrimp, and the blanched broccoli that had been out with the peanut dip into pasta for dinner Sunday night. We had grilled chicken sandwiches with slaw last night. Next I am contemplating spaghetti and meatballs with the last of those turkey meatballs, and I can turn the peanut dip into a nice bowl of peanut noodles with cauliflower and julienne-d radish on top.

The mild weather held off until the party, kind of the reverse of 2016 when it was too warm for vestibule cookie storage in the weeks leading up to the party, and then we had a snow storm on the night of the party. And even though it’s mild it’s colder than last year – highs in the 40s instead of the 50s and 60s. We’ll have a brown Christmas, but I’ll take it.

Here’s few last cookie pics, although the fig bars were actually the last kind and I didn’t photograph them, till now.