The CDFI potluck was on Sunday, the 18th. It was great – and Albany John and I actually made a ton of food. The last time we waited until the last minute and made mini apple pies. Which were good, but man, we could do better! We had to prove it to ourselves.
I knew I was going to make bread. Bread and baked goods are totally do-able. So, I found a recipe from Coconut and Lime for focaccia. I went with focaccia because Albany John used up the last egg in our fridge, and I didn’t feel like walking over to Stewart’s to get more. Hey, it was kind of chilly out.
I doubled the recipe and hoped for the best. I don’t have much luck with doubling. I also got some new yeast in a huge container, so it’s taking some time adjusting the amount of yeast to put into each recipe.
The yeast did well, and I had some puffy cookie sheets of dough. I keep all my dough in the oven to rise in the winter, because my house is drafty. Otherwise it would take about twice the stated rise time. Brrrrrrr. Thankfully my tiny apartment sized oven (which is really too tiny. I really wish we had a normal sized oven) is gas heated, so it’s the perfect temperature to raise bread in.
The best part about making focaccia is poking the holes in it before baking! Poke, poke, poke! And then you slather that baby with some olive oil, and adorn one of them with onions. However, you should also add some salt and not forget that like I did.
They came out so well – I had two cookie sheets full of hot focaccia that stayed warm for the entire potluck!
Albany John showed off as usual and made napa cabbage dumplings stuffed with shiitakes, cellophane noodles, tempeh, and some other veggies. And he’s a hotshot cook, so he needed no recipe. They looked really good, and everyone at the potluck really liked them, or were really good and polite fakers. I was a douche and told him I would not be trying them, because he had made shiitakes one too many times for me in the past, and I was certain I would vomit if it even came close to my mouth. Told you I was a douche. But thankfully, Albany John is way used to it by now.
I also whipped up some soba noodle salad, which was super basic and probably bland (just sesame oil, vinegar and soy sauce to flavor). Another person made a great one that was super spicy! There were muffins, a ridiculously amazing bruschetta/garlic bread thing, candy apples, cheesy mashed potatoes, pies, peach mate, cookies, cheese, and juice. I also had a canister of gin and soda in the back, but I’m not very good a potlucking my booze. Yet. I had about three plates of food, no kidding. Plus the people were also great – I found out about a shmaltz sandwich, which was chicken fat and sugar. Holy cow. Or Chicken. In general, we talked about food. Wonderful! And reminisced about how good/bad our ancestors’ cooking was/is. One person brought his sitar to play, which was really relaxing and made it easy to chat about.