“…definitely the tuna tartare, and the hazelnut crusted chicken, and… then a nice, big crudite platter…”
My client was reviewing my menu suggestions for her 150-guest cocktail party, adding the last one on her own.
“NO”, I said, a little more aggressively than I had intended. “No”, softer now, but with the same sentiment. “I just can’t do crudite anymore.”
My client paused. The phone was silent. “Ok”, I caved, “we’ll figure something out. Maybe a small crudite is alright.”
Years ago, I worked as a free-lance chef for a big-time catering company in Los Angeles. We would cater colossal parties for the astronomically rich, where every display was over the top. There were epic platters of food – with sausages and cheese flown in from other countries and cupcake towers the size of New York brownstones.
We would cut vegetables for days, whittling jicama and carrot wedges into little pointy daggers, nipping the tops off radishes, and blanching broccoli and sugar snap peas into the brightest green they could be. It was a thing of beauty for sure, but we had to buy and cut three times more veggies than anyone could ever eat.
Catering is all about making platters look full at all times – which means there has to be tons of coverage. We have to make sure that if someone suddenly goes on a Persian cucumber binge, the display still looks abundant. Hey, nothing says success like excess, right? Well, 75% of the cascading peppers, baby tomatoes, and asparagus would wind up in the garbage. It was heartbreaking.
Raise your hand if you like breakfast for dinner? I LOVE breakfast for dinner and these days I am guilty of doing this more than once a week.
It's well known that paprika is the famous spice of Hungary. What I think most people don't realize is that the red powder is made from ripened peppers also called paprika. The word paprika means pepper in Hungarian, and I don't mean peppercorns, but rather the fruit or vegetable, depending on how you look at it. Hungarian sweet peppers are typically pale yellow to pale green in color when they are fresh. They can be eaten raw or cooked into many recipes. But when they ripen to bright red, they are dried and ground into the fine red powder known as paprika or what I like to call Hungarian gold.
When I was a student living in Paris, one of my favorite rituals was to treat myself to a tiny lemon tart at a local patisserie after class. There were dozens of shops to choose from along my walk from the Sorbonne to my small apartment near the Place des Victoires.
by Lori Longbotham and is the best version I’ve had outside of Paris – the zest in the filling and in the crust gives it a great burst of lemon flavor.
Recently I was at a dinner hosted by