All the Ingredients

What to do with Leftovers from Lunch for 100

When I was planning the Zachs' graduation party with the other Zach's  mom, it never occurred to me that there would be leftovers. I have fed Zach and his friends. There are never leftovers. But I never considered that by the time you get to your third or fourth graduation party of the day, you really don't want two or three sandwiches. So when the party was over, the tent taken down, and the chairs folded up, I was left with (approximately): 10 pounds of pulled pork; 7 pounds of baked beans; a huge bowl of sliced strawberries; a huge bowl of sliced watermelon; three large bags--one each--of broccoli, cauliflower, and baby carrots; 72 cans of assorted diet pops; 6 large bags of chips, including Fritos and Cheetos, some of which had been opened; one large pan of iced brownies; and 1/8 of a chocolate sheet cake.

We ate pulled pork sandwiches with baked beans and chips and raw veggies for two days, quickly reaching the point where we craved something different. Like pizza. That was a nice break, but every time I opened the refrigerator, I saw all the tubs of food, the baggies of fruit and vegetables.

Before the strawberries spoiled, I mixed them with rhubarb out of the garden and made a strawberry-rhubarb crisp. My husband did his best to eat large quantities of watermelon every day, but other than watermelon ice or perhaps a blended watermelon drink, there is not a lot to do with leftover watermelon. You can't grill it or make a pie out of it. (Had I not been so brain-dead from weeks of cooking and the effort of the party, I would have done an internet search and discovered that there are indeed recipes out there for watermelon pie --including a traditional Greek recipe--and grilled watermelon.) Some of the watermelon spoiled.

Based on something I had seen on the Food Network once, we made pulled pork nachos. The recipe is simple:

In a metal baking pan, carefully lay our your favorite brand of plain tortilla chips. Carefully spoon a little bit of the pulled pork onto each nacho. Then sprinkle with grated cheddar cheese and your favorite barbecue sauce. Heat in a  400 degree oven until the cheese melts and bubbles. They are great with a side dish of cole slaw.

That got rid of the bag of leftover tortilla chips. With the bag of opened Fritos on their way to stale, I tried a version of Frito Pie. In this recipe, I put the pulled pork across the bottom of the baking pan first, then top it with the Fritos and grated cheddar. This got thumbs up from the whole family. And were great with a side dish of baked beans.

Finally, I made pulled pork enchiladas, using the pork in place of shredded chicken. I used the same enchilada sauce (package mix plus tomato paste) and corn tortillas as usual. By far this was the most warmly received pork transformation (especially since I left the baked beans out).

With the great bags of raw broccoli and cauliflower, I was pretty much on my own. My husband and daughter will eat these vegetables if they are covered in a heavy cheese sauce. Not exactly in line with my attempts  to eat healthy after helping finish off the graduation brownies and sheet cake. So I grilled the veggies and topped whole wheat pita pizzas with them. They froze well and were great to heat up in the oven for quick work lunches.

We ate baked beans with everything long past the point of enjoying them. Finally, I was sure they were about to turn bad, so I asked my husband if he cared if I threw the rest out. He said, "No, please get rid of them!" In the end, we ate way more of the leftovers for 100 than we threw out, considering we had a little over a week to do this. There are still a few cans of pop left, and my husband is plowing his way through the last bag of stale chips. And the carrots are still fine--it was a very LARGE bag of baby carrots.

And I haven't told my husband yet, but there is another container each of baked beans and pulled pork in the freezer.

How to Make Lunch for 100

My son recently graduated from high school. In Iowa, that means a graduation party. I don't remember any of my classmates having a party when we graduated from high school, but that was a hundred years and a thousand miles ago. In Iowa, you throw a party and you invite all your friends and all your graduate's classmates, and it turns into an enormous undertaking.

Now my Zach has been friends with another Zach since they enrolled in the same daycare at the ages of four and six months. They have been neighbors, classmates, baseball teammates (and rivals), and their friendship has stood the test of eighteen years. So we  decided to have a double-Zach party, splitting the food, drinks, and prep between the two families. Since we had the bigger, flatter backyard, we rented a tent and sent out the invitations with our address.

The menu: pulled pork sandwiches, baked beans, raw veggies with dip, cut-up fruit, brownies, cake, a hundred different kinds of chips and canned pop. I took the preparation of the pulled pork and hte baked beans. And the cake. The other Zach's mom spent hours of her life cutting up fruit and veggies, and baking brownies (to go with the cake).

My preferred method of cooking a pork tenderloin to pull is on the grill, but when faced with the challenge of making pulled pork for a hundred guests, I resorted to using my crockpot. For each batch, I start with slices of one yellow onion--half goes on the bottom. Then I put in approximately five pounds of pork tenderloin, and add the other half of the onions on top. Add a cup of any broth you like--I use the fat free mushroom or vegetable out of the paper carton--and layer the rest of the onions on top.Put the lid on the top of the crock pot, turn it on high, and leave the pork to cook for six to eight hours. Approximately halfway through the cooking time, turn the meat and onions. 

When the meat is done cooking, you can put the tenderloins on a plate and pull the meat into shreds with two forks. This is the time to discard any fat left sticking to the meat. Add the shredded pork back to the crock pot and mix in approximately a cup of your favorite barbecue sauce. Usually this is when I serve the pork. In this case, for each batch I put the meat into a foil lasagna pan, covered it and put it into the freezer. If you are making lunch for 100 people, you repeat this recipe four more times. The meat freezes beautifully. For the party I thawed the trays overnight in the refrigerator, and heated them the next day in the oven, to be ready to replenish the crockpot.

For the baked beans, go to your local mart and buy the seven and half pound  can of baked beans. Saute a whole diced yellow onion. When it is translucent, add a tablespoon of raw sugar and a few sprinkles of your favorite dry rub which will turn the onions a lovely golden color. Add the onion to the can of baked beans in another crockpot. To feed 100, repeat three more times, keeping the batches of beans hot in the oven in foil lasagna pans. Buy a hundred hamburger buns, and lot of cans of pop, and bags of chips.

Then on the day of the party, put up the tent, put out the food, and enjoy the company!

Next: what to do with leftovers from lunch for a 100...

The Last Indoor Meals of Winter: Chili with Cornbread

I love chili. It's got meat, beans, veggies, tomatoes--all cooked together with some spice. It's one of my favorite cold-weather meals.

During a meal of chili early this winter, my husband mentioned that while my chili was fine, it wasn't really one of his favorite meals. I am still surprised--after almost 24 years of marriage--to discover a food preference or non-preference of my husband's. My children's' food likes and dislikes change with the day of the week, hour of that day, and position of the moon. I'm used to that. But if my husband and I were on the OldyWed Game, I would get a perfect score on all the food-preference questions. Or so I thought.

I am not about to give up chili, so I had to think up a way to make it more husband-friendly. There are two things my husband thinks improves almost any meal--the addition of bread and cheese. Now I could just sprinkle cheese on the chili, but I decided to combine it with the cornbread I usually serve as a side dish. I rooted around on the food recipe web-sites and found a cornbread that is meant to be layered on top of chili and baked.

When I make chili for potlucks, people always ask me for the recipe. But it's one of those dishes I just make. There is no exact recipe. For the chili topped with cornbread, I start with one and a half pounds of meat: lean ground beef, lean ground turkey, or sometimes a mixture of half and half. I saute it in a Dutch oven on the stove-top and drain the fat. Then I dice a whole large carrot, a couple of stalks of celery, and one or two cloves of garlic, and saute them in a little olive oil until they are translucent. I do this in the Dutch oven while the meat drains since I am too lazy to wash extra pans.

Then I add the ground meat back to the vegetables and add canned tomatoes and tomato sauce. I start with a large can of basic tomato sauce. Then I add a small can of diced tomatoes. These are great because you can get them with added flavor. I like to make chili with the diced tomatoes with jalapenos. When all of this is mixed together, if there are not enough tomatoes for me (a visual thing), I add another small can of diced tomatoes. This is a matter of preference.

At this point I add one packet of McCormick's Original Chili Seasoning. My family prefers the mild, but the hot version is good too. I also add the water recommended on the packet. Yes, I can add chili and other seasonings myself, but the packet flavoring pulls the dish together. Plus, if I am using only ground turkey in the chili, the seasoning packet makes the meat look darker--almost like ground beef. Then I put the lid on the Dutch oven, and put it in a 350 degree oven for at least two hours. (If I am making just the chili, it goes into a crock pot at this point.)

About half an hour before I want to serve dinner, I mix up the cornbread topping:

• 3/4 cup cornmeal
• 1/4 cup flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 1 egg
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil

Then, using an ice-cream scoop, I mound the cornmeal mixture on top of the chili, put the lid back on the dutch oven, and bake it until the cornbread is done--about 20 minutes. Finally, I sprinkle the top of the cornbread with a cup of grated cheddar and bake it for another five minutes until the cheese has melted. This makes six good-sized servings.

The first time I did this, my husband raved about the chili. I was happy too. I had found a way to adapt the dish to both of our tastes.  Soon it will be too warm for chili. I am counting the days.

Now if only there was a way to make me love scalloped potatoes--a dish my husband loves but that I can  do without.

Handcrafted Cheeses

I have long been a fan of hand-crafted cheeses. A friend and I go to the local food co-op's fall tasting of wines and cheeses every year in order to pick out what we are going to put on the Thanksgiving appetizer cheese board.

Over the years I have become very fond of cheeses from Neal's Yard Dairy: http://www.nealsyarddairy.co.uk/about.html . I especially like the cow's milk cheeses like the Montgomery's Cheddar and Keen's Cheddar. I have tried a number of sheep's milk cheeses, but haven't developed a taste for those yet.

Last year as part of the Slow Food auction, I bid on and won a gift certificate for a pound of aged cheddar from Shelburne Farms in Vermont. I redeemed it before Christmas and received not only a pound of their Farmhouse Cheddar Cheese, but also a copy of a lovely cookbook, Cooking with Shelburne Farms. I adore cheddar and can just sit down and eat it, but I wanted to do something special with this cheese.

I also received a Williams-Sonoma gift card for Christmas. With it, I ordered a pound of Beecher's Handmade Cheeses from the Pike Place Market: half a pound of Flagship, a year-old semi-soft cow's milk cheese, and half a pound of Marco Polo, a creamy cow's milk cheese blended with green and black Madagascar peppercorns.

I wanted to do something with these cheeses that let the flavor of the cheeses come through. Something simple. So for a special dinner, I made grilled cheese sandwiches. I got a nice loaf of bread from the local food coop--a large grain loaf that crisped up beautifully. And to made each sandwich even more special, I cooked some bacon so that each sandwich was striped with it down the middle. I grilled three sandwiches, one with each cheese.

With just a little butter on the outside of each piece of bread, I grilled each to a nice golden brown. All three of these cheese are made from cows milk, and are not the bright orange of their artificially colored grocery store counterparts. The cheeses melted quickly as I grilled the sandwiches and oozed out from the edges of the bread.

My husband liked the Marco Polo best. He loves pepper and its inclusion gave the sandwich a slight bite that was a pleasant combination with the bacon. I thought the Flagship made the creamiest grilled cheese sandwich I have ever eaten. I made another one days later without the bacon, and it was sublime. But the Farmhouse Cheddar was also fabulous, and less crumbly just to eat out of hand. I have a half a pound of it left and will try a recipe from the Shelburne Farms cookbook with it.

I have always loved cheese and have greatly enjoyed getting to know handcrafted cheeses--certainly they weren't available in my mother's 1950s kitchen, although I am sure she would have loved them. There are some fine ones made locally where I live, and I will continue to buy them mail order whenever I can. Shelburne Farms has a great mail-order catalog, and the farm itself has a guest lodge and is open for tours: http://www.vtcheese.com/members/shelburne/shelburne.htm . Check out Beecher's Handmade Cheeses as well: http://www.beechershandmadecheese.com/ . Their webpage boasts that they make "The World's Best Mac & Cheese." I am sure you could do a wonderful job at home yourself with their cheeses. Until then, find a local cheese, some handmade bread, and treat yourself to a great sandwich.

 

Chocolate Chip Banana Muffins

In my last post, I stated that I only like fresh bananas, and not bananas in a food like banana bread.

That is not entirely true.

Everyone in my household likes bananas and will eat them. I have a cheerfully painted paper mache bowl that lives on the kitchen table. That is where bunches of bananas live once I bring them into the house. Need a snack? Have a banana!

However, when I bought this lurid bowl for $2.95 at the second-hand store, I had no idea that any fresh fruit that I put in it would instantly become invisible to anyone else in the house. No one ever helps themselves to a banana, and, even though I buy small bunches and try to eat one every day, every so often I am left with two or three over-ripe bananas that I will not eat. I prefer firm bananas, not those that have decomposed  to the texture of Spackle,

I have tried making banana bread. No one in my house will eat it except my daughter who will eat only one slice of any given loaf. "I'll eat it," she says. And then she doesn't. The only thing worse than wasting two mushy bananas is wasting 11/12ths of a loaf of banana bread. So I was forced to hunt for another solution.

In my favorite cookbook of 2007, Nigella Express, Nigella Lawson shares her solution to not wasting ripe bananas: Banana Butterscotch Muffins. The idea of bananas and butterscotch sounds horrible to me, but in a postscript to this recipe Nigella says that chocolate chips can be substituted for the butterscotch. Bingo!

I have adapted the recipe slightly to make it a little healthier. Everyone in the house loves these. I like my Chocolate Chip Banana muffin in the afternoon with a cup of tea.

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. It takes exactly ten minutes to mix these muffins up--they are indeed express. I put 2-3 chcocalte chips on the top of each muffin to make them look prettier.

In a medium-sized mixing bowl put:

• 1 2/3 cups flour
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 t baking powder
• 1/2 t baking soda

In a 2-cup glass measuring cup mix:

• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1/4 cup applesauce
• 2 eggs (I use Egg-Beaters)

Stir the liquid into the dry ingredients for a few seconds. In the measuring cup mash 1 large, or 2-3 small ripe bananas (You have a lot of leeway here). Add the banana to the mixture in the bowl and mix completely with a spatula, being careful not to over-mix. Then fold in 2/3 of a cup of chocolate chips--semi-sweet are good, dark chocolate are sublime. Bake for 20 minutes until the muffins are browned. Eat the first one while they are still warm.

Raising the Bar--Quaker Oats True Delights

I like a good bowl of crunchy granola with some milk and sliced banana. I also like to take a banana and dip it into the granola, eating the fruit bite by bite, dip by dip, sitting at the kitchen table watching the birds at the feeder outside.

Of course, although I try not to be, I am a typical America. If I can get it to go, eat it in the car, I like it. Granola bars are the perfect food for eating on the move. I have been thinking about them because as part of Foodbuzz, I signed up to be a "food taster." I sign up, they send me free food, and I taste it. This food blogging is rough, but someone has to do it.

So the first product sample arrived several weeks ago: Quaker Oats New True Delight granola bar line with three flavors: Dark Chocolate Raspberry Almond, Honey Roasted Cashew Mixed Berry, and Toasted Coconut Banana Cashew Macadamia Nut. Each has a 140 calories, 5 or fewer grams of fat, 2 grams of protein, 3 grams of fat, and at least 4 words in its name. All of the bars were shiny with corn syrup and had 8-10 grams of it.

Once the package of sample granola bars arrived--two of each flavor--I began to notice just how many granola bars surround me on a daily basis. They are like varieties of marmalade: I always have lots around. I have two kinds in my locker at work.  I have six kinds at home, another kind in my gym locker, several in my canvas lunch bag, and one in my car. I am always trying new ones. They are portable. Very portable. And they may have expiration dates, but they never seem to get stale. However if they travel around too long in my bag, they can get mushed flat to the wrapper or crumble in pieces when I open them.

Granola bars are everywhere. As I pushed my cart through my small town grocery store the other day, there were two separate large displays of them. Fudge-dipped bars have the most sugar and are the least resilient. They melt if left in a warm car, and gum to the wrappers if they are trampled in my bag. The kids like those best. I prefer bars that have chocolate chunks and dried fruit. They tend to have fewer grams of sugar and more grams of fiber.

I was excited to test the new granola bars. Treats! I started with the Toasted Coconut Banana Macadamia Nut. The name was almost as long as the granola bar. I have a number of food preferences. One of them is that I only like bananas and strawberries as actual bananas and strawberries. I don't like banana bread, and I don't like strawberry jam on my toast in the morning (although I will eat if if breakfast is brought by room service on a tray and there is no little jar of marmalade). I really liked the Toasted Coconut Banana Macadamia Nut. I love coconuts and macadamia nuts, and their flavors were the prominent ones with the hint of banana in the background.

Next I tried the Honey Roasted Cashew Mixed Berry. Cashews are okay, but they are not a nut I would have in the house if it weren't for the fact that my husband likes them. This wasn't a bad granola bar by any means, but it wasn't my favorite. One thing I noticed with this bar is that, unlike most processed food, these granola bars look like the picture on the wrapper when you slide them out.

Last I tried the Dark Chocolate Raspberry Almond. This granola bar has a lot going for it. I prefer dark chocolate to milk any day, and it blended well with the raspberries and almonds. This was my favorite of the three, and the one I went to the store and bought for myself. This is the granola bar I eat in the afternoon to keep me out of the vending machine at work. My favorite candy bar out of the machine has twice as many calories, more than twice the amount of fat, only 1/3 of the fiber, and 20 more grams of sugar than this True Delights bar.

Check them out at http://quakertruedelights.comand get your free sample. And check out Foodbuzz while you're there.

New Year, New Food

The problem with working retail is that I lose the months of November and December to my job. Last week, when I had stopped working six-day weeks, I realized that I couldn't remember the last time I had cooked a meal from scratch. Or had enough energy to think about cooking a meal from scratch. I had ordered a ham and pears and we ate ham sandwiches with pears for Christmas dinner. Since Christmas was the only day off I had that week, that was my speed. So last week I began my re-entry into the food world by making chili.

I had made chili one Saturday for my fellow employees. It had received rave reviews, so I made it for my family. Someone asked me for the recipe but chili is one of those dishes I don't really have a recipe for, but it goes something like this:

Brown one pound of the leanest ground turkey. Chop and saute together a small onion, three carrots, three stalks of celery, and a pound of mushrooms. Mix with the turkey in a dutch oven with two medium cans of chopped tomatoes, a large can of tomato sauce, and a packet of Lowry's mild chili seasoning. You can jazz this recipe up by using a hotter seasoning and using the chopped tomatoes with jalapenos. Add one can of red kidney beans that have been rinsed. Put the  lid on the Dutch oven and cook in a 350 oven for about an hour and a half. (There is a lot of wiggle room here. You can certainly make this chili with beef, but we are trying to have a healthier new year in our house.

With half an hour to go before people will be banging their spoons on their bowls, mix the cornbread topping:

• 3/4 cup cornmeal

• 1/4 cup all-purpose flour

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1/2 cup buttermilk

• 1 large egg

• 2 teaspoons oil

 

and drop by spoonfuls on top of the chili. Put the lid back on the Dutch oven and cook for another 20-25 minutes until the cornbread is cooked through. For the last few minutes, top with a handful of grated sharp cheddar. Serve in bowls with a topping of half salsa, half sour cream mixed together.

This was a very simple meal to make. I was warm and happy from eating the chili AND from knowing that my cooking life is coming back.

Happy New Year!

Final Harvests

It is 36 degrees outside and snowing puffy flakes that won't stick. The tomato plants have all turned brown and flopped over. The giant shrub of parsley has finally succumbed to the cold and deflated into a flat circle in the flower bed. It's the third week of November and the last tomato was just picked ten days ago. The weather has gone from end of summer to winter with not much autumn in between.

But for the last two weeks I have been harvesting and putting up the end of the garden produce. I have dried countless batches of oregano, parsley, lavender, sage, and basil in the food dehydrator. I harvested twenty small to medium onions that are hanging in the basement, and dried several batches of leeks diced into small pieces. I also slit, seeded and dried eight jalapeno peppers--the crop was much larger than that but we ate a lot of them in salsas. I made many batches of tomato sauce for the freezer.

I harvested roughly two dozen stumpy carrots. They were on the side of the garden not washed out by the summer's flood, but still they seemed to suffer from stunted growth. I am enjoying them, but they taste a little too much like dirt for the rest of the family. They will be finished off as the Thanksgiving carrot salad next week.

And then there were the sweet potatoes.

I have never grown sweet potatoes before. I found the plants--a dozen for $2.27 at the hardware store greenhouse--and thought I would give them a try. I love sweet potatoes. I dug a bed for them, and spaced the plants out with about eight inches in between them. They grew. And they grew. Like last summers pumpkins, the vines spread out and tried to take over. But the potatoes were growing underground, and the vines were easily trimmed back with the mower when they encroached too far on the lawn, so they were not too invasive. They grew into the arbor vita shrubs behind the bed where they were planted and out the other side. When I finally pulled the vines up, some of them were more than twelve feet long.

I had put black plastic down around all my plants, with grass clippings over the top to keep it down. When I pulled up the vines and then the plastic, the potatoes were hiding just under the surface around the main stem into the ground. Each vine produced three to four potatoes. BIG potatoes. I gave some away and wrapped the rest in newspaper and put in the basement. They will be baked in the oven and mashed. I add a little butter and ginger and freeze them in one-cup containers. We will have mashed sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving, as well as sweet potato rolls.

For these I use a potato bread recipe out of Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads, and substitute mashed sweet potatoes for the mashed white potatoes the recipe calls for. This was done one Thanksgiving several years ago when I realized that I only had enough white potatoes to mash for dinner, and not enough to use for the rolls. I thawed some mashed sweet potatoes from the freezer and made the dough using those. Everyone raved about the rolls that year, and I have made them that way ever since. Last year my son walked through the kitchen and caught me mixing up the dough with the mashed sweet potatoes. He doesn't like them, and said that I was ruining the rolls and he wouldn't eat any at dinner. He ate nine. 

There is still a basket of Roma tomatoes on the table ranging from green to almost overripe. We are slicing them on pizza, adding them to salads, and trying to use them all up. There are many containers of tomato sauce in the freezer, onions, sweet potatoes, frozen packs of rhubarb and our first small strawberries, and lots of dried herbs waiting to be used as seasonings all winter--the dried sage will go nicely in the cornbread stuffing for the turkey. In spite of the flood and all the rain that took out the beans, cucumbers, and the beets, it was a good year for the garden. We will have a lot to be Thankful for next Thursday.

Pimento Cheese Sandwiches

Last weekend, I made food for a friend's baby shower. The party was in the middle of the afternoon and we wanted food that was easy to eat that didn't require silverware. I couldn't face another platter of cold-cuts and cheese, or sliced chicken wraps, so I made finger sandwiches.

My age is really showing here, because I don't think people make platters of finger sandwiches anymore. At least not here in the Midwest. When I was a sophomore in high school over thirty years ago, my school had a mother-daughter tea in the spring. My mother was in charge of the finger sandwiches for two hundred girls and mothers, and the two of us made hundreds of ham salad sandwiches. It was at least a decade before I could look a ham salad sandwich in the face. But as a hostess, I have always had a fondness for finger food for parties. Especially for showers where people are sprinkled throughout a living room to watch the bride-to-be or mother-to be-open presents.

For this shower, I decided to make ham salad, olive and cream cheese, and pimento cheese finger sandwiches. The nice thing about these were, I could mix up the spreads and make the sandwiches a day or two early, and they would keep beautifully. I also had my bases covered for the Muslim and vegetarian friends in the crowd who couldn't eat the ham salad.

The ham salad was easy. I had baked a ham and ground chilled slices of it in the food processor with sweet pickle relish and mayonnaise until it was the right consistency. You have to be careful not to over-process ham salad, or it becomes too pastey. You want to be able to see little pieces of ham and pickle.

For the olive and cream cream cheese spread, I started by putting a block of cream cheese in the food processor and adding a small can of sliced black olives. To perk this recipe up a bit, I also added a half a cup of a variety of olive--mostly green--that I had bought at the food co-op. The zesty green olives gave the spread more olive flavor.

Then I made the pimento cheese following my mother's recipe:

• 1 lb grated cheddar cheese (the recipe in her handwriting actually says "rat cheese"--I think this means mild cheddar, but I like sharp)
• 8 oz softened cream cheese
• 1 T melted butter
• 1 C mayonnaise
• 1 4 oz jar pimento cheese
• dash of Worcestershire sauce
• dash of Angostura bitters

I didn't add the bitters because I didn't have any, so I doubled the Worcestershire sauce and added an extra 2 oz jar of pimentos because I like a lot of them in my pimento cheese. My mother used to make this when there was only about a cup of mayonnaise left in the large mayonnaise jar, and would then pack the cheese spread into this handy container.

Finger sandwiches are made on bread that you have cut the crusts off of, and that are then cut into three "fingers" or four triangles. I like to use wheat and white bread so that the sandwiches can alternate colors on the platter. There are lots of nice breads available, but I always use Pepperidge Farm bread for finger sandwiches as my mother did. It holds up well to the trimming and tastes good. To keep the sandwiches from drying out, I packed them in plastic lidded containers between layers of damp paper towels (my mother, of course, used damp linen tea towels).

The sandwiches were a hit at the party. We served them with potato chips, small fruit kabobs, and a punch made of Sprite and limeade. Sometimes old-fashioned food is just what you need.

After the party I looked in several cookbooks to see what sorts of pimento cheese recipes exist. IBeing Dead is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral  by Gayden Metcalfe devotes an entire page to discuss this "Southern pate" debating the pros and cons of sweet versus savory, and creamy versus fluffy. The six pimento cheese recipes here run the gamut from simple to complex, but the sweet pimento cheese recipe sounds awful to me. I can't imagine putting sugar in a cheese spread.

The "Epilogue" to Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Souther Specialties: An Entertaining Life (with Recipes) by Julia Reed is entirely about pimento cheese, and gives an overview of the ways this spread changes throughout the South. I can see the merits of adding jalapenos or pecans, but I would never use either. And if I felt the urge to add onion, I would just grate in the tiniest bit.

I was fascinated by the section on pimento cheese in The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbookby Matt & Ted Lee. Their basic recipe uses a red pepper they have blackened, peeled and diced, themselves. That sounds wonderful. They also include a recipe for a pimento cheese that can be used for grilled pimento cheese sandwiches or to top hamburgers. This recipe uses only cream cheese and no mayonnaise so that the resulting mixture is thick enough to slice when it's chilled. I can see the attraction of this. One of the ways I prefer my pimento cheese sandwich is to toast the Pepperidge Farm Bread, spread the cheese, and eat the sandwich immediately while it is hot. The Lee Brothers explain that to grill the pimento cheese you have to take the mayonnaise out of the recipe or the spread breaks down when it is cooked. I will have to try this new twist on an old favorite.

Foodbuzz Publisher Community Launches

I started this blog for a lot of reasons, one of which is that is wonderful to think of people reading these entries because they are interested in food and what I have to say about it. But there have been benefits that I never could have predicted--one of which is that I have become part of a large community of food bloggers who are interested in writing and reading about food, recipes, cookbooks, and dining experiences.

I don't remember how I first stumbled onto Foodbuzz's home page, but I was excited to see that there were other people blogging about food and restaurants in the Midwest, and in Iowa, as well as other places in the world where I dream of going. Now Foodbuzz has organized food bloggers into a community of over 1000 foodies in 45 countries and 863 cities. Not only could I go online and read current restaurant reviews before I went to Chicago earlier this month, but I am also making friends with other food bloggers all over the country.

One of the blogging events that Foodbuzz recently sponsored was "24 Meals, 24 Hours, 24 Blogs," where 24 bloggers all over the world hosted a meal of their own design and blogged about it within a particular 24-hour period. If you want to read about some creative meals, start there. As Ryan Stern Director of the Foodbuzz Publisher Community said, this event "illustrates exactly what the future of food publishing is all about--real food, experienced by real people, shared real time."

Buzz on.