Just focus on the cute olive penguins and ignore how far behind I got with documenting these….
The penguins were from #31: Tree-hunting Edition, and they weren’t actually experimental—I’ve made them before. I don’t remember where I got the recipe/idea (you can basically see how to make them). I’m going to go out on a limb and say I saw a cover of Women’s Day in the grocery-story check-out line? That tracks, right? I will say I spice up the cream-cheese “tummy” filling by adding a bit of prepared horseradish. The remaining recipes for tree-hunting day were as follows:
- Roasted tomato-harissa soup with olive toasts—except instead of the toasts I did southern sesame cheddar wafers. This was great and just what the doctor ordered after a long, hard afternoon of stomping through the woods looking for the perfect Christmas tree.
- Sesame halvah tea cake: everyone loved this recipe.
Going back in time a bit: ESC #30 was Georgian Thanksgiving Edition; the menu is pictured below and all the recipes were from Darra Goldstein’s wonderful A Georgian Feast.
For ESC #31, we watched the fabulous (in both senses of the word) Telugu action movie RRR and selected a menu of Indian and Southeast Asian recipes to go with it. The curried tomato galette was the definite MVP, and the banana fritters were a hit, too. The coconut tamarind curry was generally well received, though our youngest participants found it a bit tart for their tastes. The rest was fine but not memorable—unlike the movie (highly, highly recommend it as long as you like action movies and can stomach some bloody violence—it’s not gratuitous, given the harrowing context of colonial oppression and rebellion across India in the 1920s).
The Rookery 