Cocktail Party Porn!

[eri_chan]

Some of you may remmeber that I was asking for recipe ideas for a cocktail party I was throwing for my other half's b-day. Well, the party was this past weekend, and thanks to a couple of great suggestions from people here to round out my menu I think it was a huge success (as the dishes I made based on ideas from you folks were the first to go!

Comments

[hellsbebop]

It all looks amazing! Did the phyllo cups for the spanakopita come pre-made? Does the recipe differ at all from regular spanikopita?

And I would love the recipe for that cake!

[eri_chan]

I made the phyllo cups myself, but they're really very easy (or at least, as easy as working with phyllo dough ever is) - I just layered four sheets of the phyllo with a bit of butter brushed between each layer, then used a pizza cutter to cut the layered dough into a dozen squares (I guess they were about 3-3/5" square, though I'm not really sure... I just made sure to cut the dough into 12 equal parts). THen you just spray a muffin pan with cooking spray and gently press a square of dough into each cup. They'll sort of naturally create all those pretty folds, but you can probably arrange the dough however you like. Then I pre-baked them in the oven for about 10 minutes at 300-325 degrees (my oven is finicky so I'm not sure) before filling them and baking them again to heat the filling.

And I just used a recipe for spanakopita that I found online, and just spooned the mixture into the cups rather than actually making it into a pie. Not entirely sure just how authentic it was, but it tasted good :)

As for the cake, I used this

[eri_chan]

Well, I did a fair amount of advance prep - I made the dumplings/wontons/egg rolls the week before and kept them in the freezer. Similarly most of the dips/spreads were made ahead of time and kept refrigerated. The polenta was made the night before, as was the cake (though I didn't assemble anything until the day of.) The day of the party, we started cooking and assembling things at about noon, and honestly we were working sort of unsteadily right up until about 6:30 (the stuff that was deep fried required my other half and I to double team at the stove, so that meant we couldn't work on anything else...) A lot of that time was spent rewarming and assembling/plating things though, and not really cooking. I suspect if I'd streamlined the process a bit more and figured out ways to do mroe advance prep, we could have knocked it down to a few hours overall rather than what probably amounted to about 15 hours of work all told. I think part of the problem was that a lot of the dishes had to be made right before the party in order to come

[eri_chan]

I am scared of deep frying.

Frankly, so am I. It strikes me as dangerous and rather wasteful with all the oil you use and then have to toss, not to mention being so unhealthy.... but I made an exception this once for the sake of the couple of menu items that absolutely required it. Its not something I would EVER do regularly.

[fireyirishangel]

I want to come to parties at your house!

[aleph_zahir]

Impressive! I want some of those shrimp NOW (and it's only 9:36am in California :-p ).