Spring Fling!

My brilliant cousin gave me a beautiful vintage table cloth with bouquets of muted pink and teal flowers against a bordered pale blue and white background. When she saw it at a flea market it struck her because she remembered from a recent visit that we had set of hand-embroidered floral napkins that would match perfectly. She also paired this with a set of blue candlesticks to wrap up the whole thing, suggesting it would be an idyllic spring table setting. But who can wait? I hastened to set up a somewhat wintry table with the promise of spring just bursting through and launched my Spring Fling!

Behold this woodland creature who stopped by!

An issue of Gourmet magazine set the stage for this one, from January of 2008. The fabulous menu for eight is quite extensive and looked absolutely exhausting and impossible to execute without staff! I just cut down on the outrageously overwrought menu and corners as well to make it as simple as I could. I prepped the sugared blackberries days before, planned my table, braised the pork in advance and had the pots and pans I would need at the ready the day of the party. Don't forget to chill lots of white wine! Biscuits were courtesy of Pillsbury.

Champagne punch was served first before we moved to the dining table for my Night and Day Souffle and hot biscuits with butter and honey. Pork hash accompanied sumptuous shrimp and grits, followed by a respite of winter lettuces with warm bacon dressing. Ambrosia, sugared blackberries and biscuits ensued with a bread pudding of sorts until we were all appropriately flung!

THURSDAY:
Sugared Blackberries
This was so nice--do take the three days to macerate your berries though, and take them out of the refrigerator to tend to them once a day by briefly stirring.

FRIDAY:
Made Braised-Pork Hash
Adding homemade vanilla extract at the end was my own invention, otherwise I would have tossed in a split vanilla bean at the start, had I not thought to do so too late. It was a great idea--and if only fortitude had won over timidity, I would have added more.

SATURDAY:
Double-checked my lists and chopped/sliced/diced whatever I could.
Made "Bread Pudding" with cubes of a Betty Crocker orange cake, added in Jell-o banana pudding, later to be drizzled with chocolate sauce and topped with fresh strawberries.

SUNDAY: Spring Fling!
Champagne Punch
This was so good. Can be chilled up to 3 hours before serving; Champagne bubbles in at the end.

Night and Day Souffle
I couldn't be bothered with the timing of the creamed eggs with spinach and country ham found here. It looks really wonderful, just too much. My Night and Day Souffle is much easier. For this version, I just beat 8 eggs together with heavy cream, chopped bacon and chives, salt and pepper and a little grated Parmesan on top. It goes into a 350-degree oven for 40 minutes or so and DONE. Serve it quickly though while it is puffed up and strutting; soon it naturally does collapse. Put up a side of Pillsbury biscuits with honey and butter.

Lowcountry Breakfast Shrimp
Prep your onions (just slice them and ignore the worry-work of a fine dice), garlic and scallions the night before. Cook them in butter ahead of time and add in the shrimp later, just before serving. Dredge half of the shrimp in flour and work in to create a nice creaminess that won't overcook the shrimp. Threads of thyme are a recommended (by me) addition.

Creamy Stone-Ground Grits
Use instant grits instead of all the folderol and add heavy cream, milk and butter to your liking. Enough already.

Braised-Pork Hash
This is not difficult at all. The braising just takes a lot of time so just move on to other things like laundry while the meat simmers down and falls off the bone.

Winter Lettuces with Warm Sweet-and-Sharp Dressing
Again, couldn't deal with all of this--oy, boiling vinegar, reducing? Ugh. I adapted my go-to Shallot and Champagne Vinaigrette courtesy of Michael Lomonaco, found here. And I made it the day before in the food processor and kept it in the refrigerator instead of huffing and puffing over an oven. I subbed cider vinegar for Champagne vinegar; brown sugar for regular sugar; 1/4 cup melted bacon grease with 1/2 cup olive oil instead of just 3/4 cup olive oil to create an entirely new, hassle-free dressing. Crumbled bacon was thrown in over the salad and a little extra bacon grease (warmed from the microwave) too. Jaws dropped.

Ambrosia
So easy and delicious--from jars of Del Monte supremed white and pink grapefruit and oranges, no apologies! I wasn't about to supreme 8 navel oranges. The only thing that takes any time is the chilling of this dessert in the fridge. And no, I did not roast a whole coconut in the oven and hack it apart. A bag of shredded coconut is quite serviceable. Please.

Sugared Blackberries
Served with a pillar of more biscuits, cold this round.

Our Orange Cake and Banana "Bread Pudding" is seen below.

Do you know how to spring fling?

Soundtrack: Lawrence Welk, Champagne Time; Art Van Damme Quintet, Manhattan Time; Stephan Grappelli, Shades of Django; Bossa n' Madonna; Combo; Fleetwood Mac and Annie Lennox lingered on

Night and Day Souffle

I created this souffle of sorts back at my parents' home in New Hampshire over the holidays a few years ago. I was staring into the fridge in hopes of coming up with something to make for dinner, and the result was excellent with a glass of red wine. I've also made the souffle for breakfast and it was just as satisfying with orange juice and coffee. The flexible dish can be served as a terrific nosh anytime, or made ahead of time and quickly reheated.

Night and Day Souffle
Serves 4

Ingredients
6 eggs
Milk
1 chopped onion, sauteed in butter
4 dinner rolls
4 slices of cheese
4 strips of bacon

Method
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a casserole dish, whisk eggs with a little milk and add salt and pepper to taste. Incorporate the onion. Add dinner rolls (baked Pillsbury Grands would be a lively idea) to the dish and place bacon over them crosswise. Top with slices of your favorite cheese such as American or Swiss and bake for 40 minutes. Cut into four portions and serve.

First published in part in Next magazine.

BOOK/A TABLE - Twisted Candles Peach Crisp for a Nancy Drew Dinner Party!

I might have stolen it, but I honestly don't think I did. And yet there it is in my possession, has been for many years, The Nancy Drew Cookbook: Clues to Good Cooking by Carolyn Keene, first published in 1973. Inside the front cover, there's a stamp from the Dover Public Library Children's Room in New Hampshire. Hm. I'm pretty sure that there was a yard sale of some kind and I was the first to snatch up the volume, as slim and elegant as the Titian-haired Ms. Drew herself. I'm going to go with that.

Tell us, Nancy--what is the clue in the cookbook?

For me, I just set out to make a meal for some good old friends one evening. I didn't clue them in as to what exactly I would be serving from the cookbook, stolen from Chapter Four (the menu listing of Picnic and Patio Get-Togethers). I suppose I could have done something somewhat more refined like the Souffle Gruen and Lilac Inn Consomme as a starter, but I love anything on a patio and chose items from that instead. There are some hair-raising cliffhangers too, like what would happen if we ate the Leaning Chimney Cones, baloney stuffed with cream cheese and chopped pimentos? The Diary Chicken Salad with mayonnaise, Mandarin oranges, white grapes, pineapple rings and a banana?

Throughout the whole meal, I made some concessions, some modern updates (I never used any margarine for example, only butter). 

During the cocktail hour on the sundeck, I served Miss Hanson's Deviled Eggs (positioned on plum tomato slices to anchor them and topped with a slice of olive) as an appetizer when our guests arrived. I added a little Penzey's Shallot Pepper to the yolk mixture for a satisfying bite. We drank a few adult versions of the Scarlet Slipper Raspberry Punch, laced with vodka. Here, we kept the raspberry gelatin, but omitted the "raspberry drink powder mix" and "frozen lemonade concentrate" and a whole cup of sugar on top of that! Instead we used cranberry raspberry juice, light lemonade, and a little lemon zest.

Crossword Cipher Chicken (a whole chicken cut into eight parts) with crushed Ritz crackers (which subbed for "unsweetened cracker crumbs") was baked for an hour. I used only about half a stick of butter to dip the chicken before breading it with the crackers, onion powder, parsley flakes and grated Parmesan, as opposed to two sticks of butter that the recipe suggested.

Same went for Shadow Ranch Barbequed Beans that I made the night before: the recipe also called for two sticks of butter. Don't you miss the 70's? I didn't add any sugar, except for half the amount of dark brown sugar and lightened it up with a can of vegetarian beans and pork and beans, instead of two cans of the latter. I did throw a piece of bacon in though.

Emerson Cookout Potatoes with bacon, a blend of cubed cheeses and onions baked in the oven while the chicken cooked too and was then served alongside. It was a lot of food but, perhaps not so mysteriously, everything disappeared! If you do happen to have any of the potatoes left over, they'd be great heated up the next day with some scrambledeggs.

We finished the dinner with this recipe for a delicious Twisted Candles Peach Crisp. What a ball--it's no mystery why we love our old friends!

Twisted Candles Peach Crisp

Ingredients:

1 stick(4 ounces) butter
2 16-ounce cans sliced peaches
1 cup light brown sugar
1 cup flour
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

Method:

Heat the oven to 375 degrees.

Let butter soften outside the refrigerator. Drain peaches and dry them on paper towels.

Mix sugar, flour, and cinnamon in a bowl. Put the softened butter into this mixture. Combine ingredients with a fork until well mixed into a dough.

Place peaches in the bottom of the baking dish. Spread the dough over them. Bake on the bottom shelf of the oven for 50 minutes.
Makes 6 servings

Detective Dynamite:

“For an extra delicious taste, add a scoop of ice cream to each serving. This recipe can even be used as a birthday cake. Insert a tiny candle in each portion and light before serving.”

Thanks to NancyDrewSleuth.com for posting this recipe and others from The Nancy Drew Cookbook!