Perrymecium

This was by far the toughest and longest Family Dinner that I’ve ever prepared. It was a lot of dishes and a lot of trouble, but I was determined to make it good because the mystery guest was Sophia, a small deity in taekwondo.

The cooking started two days early so I could start curing the fish and make the baklava. Baklava is the most troublesome dish I have ever cooked and it is truly a labor of love. The fillo dough is some of the hardest stuff to work with - it kept ripping and folding in on itself. Then there’s chopping 5.5 cups of walnuts, melting 3 sticks of butter, and spending 6 hours cooking a pastry. But in the end, it is totally worth it. The baklava was absolutely magnificent and definitely the most delicious dessert I’ve made so far.

The other troublesome part was the hummus. It’s not the actual preparation that’s a pain so much as getting all the ingredients in one place. I guess it’s hard because I’m not Arab and I had never bought half the supplies, but it hurt to see so many places where I could just buy giant jars of hummus. Your cooking lesson of the day is that baklava and hummus are not foods that are necessarily worth the effort of making it yourself compared to the convenience of simply buying it.

I aborted the rice noodle salad because it was not going to work. I bought wheat instead of rice vermicelli and realized too late that they are two totally different things. Another small disaster occurred with the spring rolls. I am not good at making dumplings as it is, and the spring rolls ended up broken. They still tasted good so it wasn’t a total wash.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures this time around. It’s kind of good, because it wasn’t my best effort. Other than the baklava, I would rate this Family Dinner as just pretty good. Which is a shame, because it was the costliest Family Dinner so far. I had to buy a lot of pretty unique foods and a food processor.

BTW, the mystery guests this week were brilliant. Sophia was one of the most thought-provoking and interesting guests we’ve had so far, as expected. Bobby and Mimi were also great guests.

Guests: Justin, Kelly, Aki
Mystery guests: Sophia, Bobby, Mimi
Materials cost: $400
Cooking time: 12 hours

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.