As I’ve written before, I use Paprika to organize my recipes, and one of the category labels I use is “Try” for recipes I haven’t made yet. But at some point, I started saving recipes to this category faster than I made them, and it got completely out of control–350 recipes or something like that. So, to whittle this down, I decided I would make a six-course dinner every Sunday night that I could for a group of adventurous eaters, and we would rate them together and decide which dishes were keepers and which to delete.
So far, there haven’t been too many deletes. This was this weekend’s menu*–for an apple-crushing day we did at my friend Martin’s house to make cider and brandy. The highlight was the tarte soleil from Smitten Kitchen in the middle there, which looks fussy to make but comes together very quickly with frozen puff pastry. The only change I would make is that the feta dip is delicious on its own (would be stellar with crudites) but it’s too salty on top of the tapenade filling in the tarte; so, next time I’ll switch that out for something sweeter and juicier, like an avocado or white bean dip.
- belgian endives braised in gin and orange juice
- tarte soleil with whipped feta dip
- honey-glazed nuts and fruit
- carrot-cardamom aperitif: this recipe’s been taken down from Food&Wine, but it’s basically 1/4c carrot juice, 1 T lemon juice, 1 T lime or yuzu juice, and 2 T cardamom simple syrup (steep about a dozen green cardamom pods in 6 oz of simple syrup, made w/ 2 parts coconut nectar if you like). It’s nice on its own, or you can add gin.
*Also pictured are some apple-green chile empanadas I made to use up some drops from my honeycrisp tree that couldn’t go into the brandy mash.
The Rookery 