Christian isn't wrong but if you love playing host and chef, like I do, the challenge more often is to figure out what dishes you can put together for a memorable meal for your lovely guests. It's enough if you can pull off a lip-smacking biriyani for all but I love pushing myself to try and do more than one dish. Googling 'Vegetarian recipes for a dinner party' sure gives direction, but I am yet to find a website that tells me how to make great vegetarian dishes AND tells me which ones to put together. That's partly the inspiration for this post.
Yesterday, I put together a special dinner for a friend before her last day of work. This was the fancy menu description: grapefruit salad, pomodoro and mushroom bruschetta, and Thai green curry served with fragrant rice. A lot of inaccuracies in that description, as you shall see below but well, we make mistakes to learn from them!
The 'grapefruit' salad
On a recent visit to Kumbakonam in Tamil Nadu, I stumbled across what my cousin identified as grapefruit. She was surprised to learn that it was grown locally because she said she hadn't seen grapefruit in India.
She was right. You couldn't find grapefruit in India because what we found was Pomelo, a cousin of the grapefruit. Called 'bablees naranga' in Malayalam or 'bumbilimas' in Tamil, it resembles a large orange but has pink pulp. Larger than a grapefruit, the pomelo has a thicker rind (the skin) and is green on the outside unlike the orange on the grapefruit.
The salad came out quite well. With crispy iceberg lettuce, red cabbage (yes, the purple one), the pomelo, raisins, toasted pine nuts and walnuts. We felt it needed some kind of dressing to pull it together, though. My friend had a brainwave and fixed it with a drizzle of maple syrup!
Did I say brooskettas? Oh, I meant crostinis!
We find ourselves back with the Italians who are very specific about naming things. Remember the Fancy Schmancy post on pasta names? Just like that, I learnt this time that they have two names for toasted bread with toppings- 'bruschetta' when made with wide slices of 'sourdough' bread, and 'crostini' if you use small, round slices of a white bread baguette or "French bread" (the thin, long loaf with a round cross-section)!
For the mushroom toppings, I cooked roughly chopped mushrooms in butter with shallots (aka small onions), garlic, finely chopped coriander leaves, salt, pepper and mixed herbs. For the 'pomodoro', which is Italian for tomatoes, I mixed chopped tomatoes with chopped red bell pepper (red capsicum), salt, pepper and coriander leaves. I buttered the toast before adding the mushroom toppings so that they'd taste rich and creamy. For the pomodoro, a drizzle of olive oil before the toppings kept it light and fresh. One could 'rub the garlic' on the toast before adding the toppings but I skipped the step because I had used a loaf of garlic bread.
Thai curry
The risk with trying to pull off "Asian" dishes to Malayalis is that a hint of coconut milk and you lose the exotic tag right away! Nevertheless, I managed to make one that closely matched restaurant flavours with regular spices I have in my kitchen. Normal stuff like ginger, jeera powder, coriander powder, small onions and green chillies. The not-so-regular ingredients in an Indian kitchen that I happened to have were soy sauce and lemongrass powder.I made these grooves on the carrots before slicing them in circles so they got a nice flower pattern. Of course, it got lost in the mix of vegetables and no one noticed. :(
For vegetables, I used green and red bell pepper, mushrooms, carrots and beans. Fragrant rice was Basmati rice cooked with spices like cloves and cardamom, and salt.
Needless to say, the crostinis were the hit that night! It was the perfect crunchy fun that we needed between the sweet salad and the spicy Thai gravy. Of course, our appetites definitely needed the rice and curry to fill us up. All in all, a hearty meal in spite of not sticking to one cuisine. And I definitely recommend that you try making the pomodoro crostinis- a super easy snack to make and so delicious!
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