Wednesday, January 03, 2007

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!

19 comments:

Suzanne said...

Everything looks so yummy!

Our grocery budget was way over last month so I committed to make New Year's treats from scratch with just what we had at home. We had:

Shredded BBQ Chicken Sandwiches
Salad
Cheese & cracker platter
Onion cheese ball
Fruit platter with dip (The dip was 1 part blueberry yogurt, 1 part Cool Whip.)
Chocolate Crinkle cookies

It actually turned out really great and I think we ate more healthily than we would have otherwise.

Your food looks so yummy. Can I come to your house next year? ;)

Unknown said...

Our family tradition is to have Hawaiian Haystacks for dinner made by Carronin, Rug's Bug brought the deep fryer to make french fries and I kept the M&M bowl filled.

We played SNL Trivial Pursuit and Carronin beat the peepers out of us! She's amazing!

Lia said...

looks good! i'm hungry.

Christy said...

We went to Perry's and I have to say going on that night provided us a meal that was twice the price and 1/2 the quality of a meal there any other day of the year.

Admit ADMIT it... at least one of those recipes came from Rachel Ray... I am thinking the crab meat stuff puff pasty.

Carrot Jello said...

We had meatballs for dinner. Apparently, that wasn't enough food for us, so we had turkey tortilla rollups, fruit dipped in yogurt, frosted brownies, and chips and salsa. Suprisingly, we didn't eat little smokies. That is usually my husbands holiday food of choice.
BTW, if you added me to your blogroll, or heck put me on your favorites list, you wouldn't have to do a blogger search for me. *runs sobbing from the room*

Super Happy Girl said...

I love everything you mentioned, because I love anything made out of food.
What a glorious foodie day that was. Thansk for sharing the super secrety smokies recipe, I always wanted it, this must be my first 2007 miracle.

:'( but now I'm sad because Carrot left in such a hurry.

Super Happy Girl said...

The saying is "Entre menos burros, mas olotes".
Because we have a saying for everything, 'cause we are that cool.

Oh, and a bonus: lookee here on YouTube.

Millie said...

I love food. Isn't food the best thing ever? Well, one of the best things ever?

I'm into those little puff pastry dealies (although I'd be the only one eating them) and the pizza things. Mmmmmm. If only we could pool our hors d'ouvere resources or have an appetizer-off.

Bri likes Lil Smokies and I'm hoping to change him to Lil Meatballs instead someday.

::off to comfort Carrot::

carrie said...

Your fruit punch sound and looks delicious. Your stuffed pastries sounded yummy too until the mushrooms. I hate mushrooms.

I'm glad all those hours of watching SNL reruns on the E channel finally paid off.

jams o donnell said...

Quite a spread ewbl!It was cheese and oatcakes for me with some quince jelly. Now to do something about my xmas excesses (and the November excesses, the october excesses and so on!)

elasticwaistbandlady said...

suzanne- I cheated a lot since the day fell on a Sunday and my normal "make-from-scratch" recipe time was subverted by Church. Gosh, why can't those people accommodate my party cooking schedule a little better? Next year, mi casa es su casa for the festivities if you pledge to not throw confetti all over the house at midnight.

A Payne- *sigh* You had me at French Fries.

lianne- My camera crapped out on me. Therefore, these are NOT all the original photographs by the original artist. Little Smokies light up my life and give me hope to carry on.

lia- Too bad the food didn't last longer. 8 vultures are a large hungry swarm to feed.

on the run- Do you doubt my cooking prowess? Those puffs would have made Rachael weep with envy. ENVY, I tell you!

carrot- I thought you were still incognito and on the lam from certain Communist factions. I don't want to be responsible for revealing your super secret alter ego identity. I make really, really, really good Hawaiian Meatballs. So good, in fact, that a lady at our last Homeschool Potluck practically served up the whole pot with my organic brown rice leaving my family next to nothing to dine on except the crusty macaroni salad she brought. >:(

NCS- "The miracle of the Little Smokies.......and a FAT WOMAN shall descend from her computer chair and lead them all." The Youtube link cracked me up. Papi got sniffy and said not all Spanish sayings can be translated verbatim. I showed him some American style lovin and he got over it though. We whities have our charms too, you know.

Millie- Your husband is a man of distinguished high caliber tastes, millie. I often thought that getting together with friends and having all snacky things would be fun. I would NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER call it a Potluck though. That just invites bad karma and leftover tuna casserole.

carronin- You hate 'shrooms? What??!!!? My kids love their mushroom chairs. Once upon a time I had a classic mushroom haircut. The only bad shroom incident came from flashbacks of my Mom's kitchen decorated in varying colors of brown mushrooms during my childhood. Some of the mushroom canisters had little googly eyes on them. *runs shrieking*

jams- It's the most wonderful time of the yeeeeaaaar.......to make pigs out of ourselves!

Elizabeth-W said...

We were so boring this year. Because church didn't get out til six, we didn't eat dinner til late, and then were too full of lasagna and very garlicky roasted garlic garlic bread and salad we didn't really eat much of the stuff we'd saved for treats. The treats were apple pie and raspberry pie and Blue Bunny ice cream (vanilla) which is the closest thing one can get to Blue Bell out here.
What is a Hawaiian haystack?

Mimo- JenK said...

Can I come celebrate with you next year???

We just had... um... soups because we ate at the church's linger longer. Later after we got home we had popcorn with reeeeeaaaaal butter. I haven't had in ages.

Christy said...

I thought it was funny HAHAHA!

Rainie & I were talking today about how funny your blogs are. She read me the scrapbooking blog, pretty funny. I wish I had been there, I sure do love a good camel toe joke, almost as good as a moose knuckle joke!

Millie said...

Ahem. Excuse me. Did Elizabeth just ask what a Hawaiian Haystack is?

:: fainting dead away ::

Elizabeth-W said...

Millie, that's twice you've made me feel crappy about myself! First, I'm not clever enough to post multiple times a day, and now I don't know about haute cuisine.

Elizabeth-W said...

Ok, I just googled H. H's and the number 2 entry was "Hawaiian Haystacks: Feeding Missionaries". Growing up, we never served this dish to any missionaries--I wonder if they felt relieved, or slighted.
The next time the sign-up goes around, I'll call our set and ask them if this is something they've ever heard of, and would like. On Wiki they had it as a descrpition of "convenience food". How could I grow up LDS (though not anywhere near UT) and not have heard of this?!

dalene said...

Thanks for the recipes. I'm thirsty for that punch. I'm now craving your cheese enchiladas (may I have that recipe, too?)

So much for my diet.

Will you contribute a soup recipe on my blog?

Super Happy Girl said...

Yeah, most of the time I can't translate my sayings, I'll be like "at night all cats are patched...oh wait...look patched, no that's not it" :(
It's so hard sometimes.