Food! Glorious Food!

Enquiring minds want to know what everybody ate for their annual New Year's Eve Gala. Alright, no enquiring minds plural, just one enquiring mind- Mine! At La Casa De Infidel it's a long standing tradition to have a smorgasbord pigout. Every year we have our standard hor'deuvre fare spread out by 4 in the afternoon and then we gluttonously ravage the food stocks until midnight chimes. The real hypocrisy lies in our pledging to moderate how much we eat in the New Year but having to gorge ourselves one last time on New Years Day because we also pledged to stop being so wasteful and throwing out perfectly good leftovers is indeed wasteful. I make it a goal to try one new recipe every year to see if it meets our rigorous party appetizer criteria. The winning recipes get added to the buffet collection for the following year. Competition is intense when you have to please 8 different palates residing in the same house.

Ahhhhh, Little Smokies, loved and savored the world over by distinguished carnivore connoisseurs. I enhance the flavor by using a super secret sauce concoction handed down from many generations of daredevil chefs mixing odd ingredients together and declaring recipe success if they don't die immediately after consumption. Yes, I slowcook these little beauties in the crockpot with a jar of grape jam and a bottle of chili sauce. It renders them tangy and delicious. Serving this bonafide treat to your guests screams out, "I ain't first class, but I ain't white trash!"

This is my featured guinea pig recipe for New Year's 2006. No, it doesn't actually have guinea pig in it. Rest easy, my friends, rest easy. I did in fact get by with a little help from my friends while making this though. Pepperidge Farm friends, to be exact. These delectable delights feature a mixture I whipped up of smoked salmon, lump crab meat, red peppers, onions, fresh mushrooms, and various seasonings stuffed into puff pastry. Infidel toddlers and picky 10 year old gave it a thumbs down. The rest of us didn't care because that meant double servings for us! Papi says that in ancient Mexico they had a saying that went, "Less donkeys, more food." Wisdom through the ages.

I made mini pita pizzas with fresh tomatoes and a salami topper in place of my usual stuffed cream cheese jalapenos that I make every year. Succulent and between all of us we licked the platter clean. Literally.

I practiced my wrapping skills on Sunday by putting on a little old school M.C. Hammer while layering up tasty morsels on top of multi-flavored flat breads. They were a hit! Judging from my wrapper skills, I should be inking a deal very soon. Both Jason's Deli and Quiznos are trying to woo me into an exclusive wrap contract complete with some bling and my own sandwich entourage.

I don't own a beautiful mold to make an authentic Della Robbia fruit ring for my punch so my dollar store plastic storage container had to make do. Huey Lewis was wrong. It's not "Hip To Be Square", it's hip to be rectangular! This is my favorite punch of all time. It could kick the butts of both the Hawaiian Punch dude and the Kool Aid Man in a fruit drink death match. It has equal parts white grape juice, lemonade, and orange/pineapple juice frozen with fruit and then sparkling ginger ale poured over the top. We ladled it out into little plastic champagne glasses and toasted each other because that's how we roll, dawg!