Dinner with Dave and Mi Mi

Last Saturday we had our good friends, Dave and Mi Mi over for dinner. The menu was:

Hors D’oeuvres: Home made chicken liver paté, korozot (hungarian goats cheese dip) and variety of olives.

Puréed Roasted Cauliflower Soup (recipe below), with slivered apples and gruyere cheese dallopped on the centre.

Paella with Rustic Home Baked Bread

Molten Chocolate Cake with berries and Vanilla Ice Cream

Puréed Roasted Cauliflower Soup (8, 1/2 cup servings)

check out the recipe on Foodista

1 large head of cauliflower, chopped into even chunks
1 head garlic + 2-3 tbsp olive oil + sea salt
1 small yellow onion
2-3 tbsp olive oil
sea salt to taste
3-4 cups stock of your choice (I like miso, but chicken works well too…I wouldn’t try beef!)
1 golden delicious on Jonagold apple julienned into thin slivers
4 tbsp julienned Gruyeres cheese

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350F.
Prepare garlic to roast, remove loose skin.
Take a 10″ x 10″ piece of parchment and put garlic squarely in the middle. Drizzle with olive oil and sea salt.
Take a 10″ x 10″ piece of foil and place beneath parchment, now wrap the entire garlic up so that the olive oil does leak out. Set aside.
Quarter yellow onion.
Place onion and cauliflower on a 12″ x 17″ cookie sheet with 1-2″ sides, drizzle with olive oil and sea salt, coating evenly.
Place sheet in oven, place garlic package beside it and roast for about 40-45 minutes. You don’t want the cauliflower to brown, just roast nicely.
When cauliflower is soft, place into a glass blender. Remove garlic from package and drip the olive oil onto the cauliflower in the blender. Squeeze the garlic out into the blender…the whole thing.
Pour 2 cups of stock into the blender and blend to puré, adding additional stock to desired consistency.
Using a fine seive and the back of a laddle, press the puréed soup through so that all lumps are removed.
Reheat in microwave, garnish with cheese first then the apple on top, and enjoy.

Paella (serves 4 really hungry or 6 marginally hungry people)

This is a recipe I adapted a long time ago from Ken Kostik, but I can no longer find it on line!) I find this very easy because everything is cooked independantly and then assembled in the paella pan, and reheated for about 10-15 minutes.

• 4 chicken thighs cut into halves or thirds depending on how large they are (I like the dark meat for this recipe)
• 12 shelled and deveined shrimp
• 1 calamari tube, sliced in rings about 1 cm thick
• 12-16 mussels (this may be omitted), cleaned and checked that they are alive
• 1 Chorizo sausage sliced into 1 cm thick rounds then cut in half
• 5 oz white fish of your choice (we used cod because it stands up to cooking in the rice)
• 1 tsp saffron
• 1/2 cup white wine
• 1 cup long grain white rice
• 1 tbsp smoked paprika (I generally use spanish)
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic minced finely
• 1/2 sweet onion
• 4 skinned and seeded chopped tomatoes
• 1 red pepper
• 1/2 cup frozen peas
• 1 tbsp fresh basil chiffonade
• Lemon wedges to garnish
• 2 green onions finely sliced

Instructions

1. The day before marinate the chicken thighs in 2 tbsp olive oil, smoked paprika and salt and refrigerate.
2. 1 hour before cooking the rice, soak the saffron and garlic in the white wine for about 1 hour.
3. Prepare rice in a rice cooker, adding the saffron, garlic wine and about 1/2 of the cut Chorizo sausage and remaining water as per rice instructions.
4. Using a cast iron griddle, cook the chicken thighs thoroughly. Refrigerate.
5. In the paella pan, add 1 tbsp olive oil and sauté onions until translucent, add the remaining Chorizo sausage and brown the sausage. Set aside.
6. Preheat the oven to 350F.
7. Once the rice is cooked and you are about 10-15 minutes from serving, add the rice, fish, mussels, shrimp, calamari, tomatoes and chicken. Stir well (depending on how wet you like your paella, you may wish to add chicken stock to taste – I prefer a dryer version, don’t forget that the mussels will release some liquid as well). Bake in 350F oven for about 10 minutes until shrimp is pink, mussels have opened and calamari is done but no rubbery!
8. Add frozen peas and red pepper. Stir and bake an additional 2-5 minutes, until heated through. Garnish with green onions, lemon and basil.
9. Serve immediately with fresh home made bread, and lots of wine!