January Dinner Party

This past weekend I had my first Southwest Dinner Party. I told you guys I was going to be cooking out of The New Southwest Cookbook, which is a collection of recipes from fancy restaurants in the Southwest. It was a total success! All the recipes had amazing flavor and were delicious! Here’s the recap:

Appetizer: Carnitas Napoleon with Green Chile- Tomatillo Sauce (p. 55)



These were my favorite. The presentation was really fun. They were basically stacks of fried corn tortilla squares with roasted pork (marinated for a day in a dry rub, roasted 3 hours in onion, orange and Dr. Pepper and then shredded), drizzled with a tomatillo sauce (homemade), sprinkled with cotija cheese (a hard, tangy, feta-ish cheese) and a side of home-made Terra Cotta Salsa. Yes, all of that, just for the appetizer…

Soup: Black Bean Soup with Lime Sour Cream (p.77)



This got rave reviews! Black beans were soaked overnight, then simmered with onions, ham hocks and delicious spices for hours, then blended to a not-too-smooth consistency. Topped with a lime sour cream, chopped green onions and baked tortilla strips ( I will fry them next time so they will be a bit more crisp). The flavor was great- really, really tasty- and not super heavy for a black bean soup!

Dinner: New York Strip Steaks with Chipotle Recado (p. 142)
and Spiced Artichokes with Backbone Sauce (p. 197)



These steaks were amazing! Every bite was a little bit of heaven. They sat for 48 hours in a “recado”, which is basically a marinade. This one was a super thick wet paste with all the dry ingredients of a mole (pumpkin seeds, pecans, chipotle pepper, cinnamon, ancho chile, raisins- and about 12 other ingredients) pureed together. The flavor this created was (again…) amazing!

The artichokes were fun. I had never cooked whole artichokes before and that is basically why I am doing this challenge- to try new things, techniques and ingredients. It is not the best season for artichokes- they were a little skimpy on the meat- but we had fun teaching our neighbor, Mike how to eat them! Oh, and the Backbone Sauce (which is named that because it is from Hell’s Backbone Grill in Boulder, Utah) was really tasty too- great depth of flavor with a zip of heat hiding at the end.


Dessert: Flourless Chocolate Cake (p. 223)



I was a little nervous about this one, because it involved whipping egg whites and folding them into a sugar/butter/bittersweet chocolate mixture. Would it deflate the eggs? Eeeek! I thought at first that they were (the whites went in the havy mixture in small batches) but by the end it was a light fluffy batter. This is not a pretty dessert- it comes out looking squashed and slightly sunken, but it was amazingly light (“mousse-like” as Andrew described it) but with really dense chocolate flavor. Yum!

We are super excited about February!