dimanche 21 octobre 2007

diner entre filles chez pilar

What started as a simple "girls night" (in vengeful response to Julien, Pablo, etc. boys' poker night) turned into a spanish-style FEAST, with pants coming unbuttoned (due to expanded stomachs) and not walking, but rolling down the four flights of stairs of Pilar's apartment.  

Dishes:
Soupe à l'aile - a Spanish soup made with whole cloves of garlic, Spanish ham, and whole eggs.  Incredible.  Pilar
Poulet à la Moutarde - a dish composed of three ingredients: Strips of white chicken breast, creme fraiche, and mustard (the kind with the seeds in it).  Utter simplicity but delicious.  Pilar
Sweet Salad à la Goat Cheese - Pilar's secret recipe that I've appropriated into my regular diet because it's a) delicious, b) good for you, c) so easy to make, and d) cheap.  Alki

Dessert:
Fried sugar-coated apples, covered with a cider cream sauce - Orgasmic.  Ingrid
Marzipan cake - A girl's weakness.  Beth
Mint chocolate chip ice cream - Again, a girl's night essential. Alki

Wine:
Pinot Grigiot from Alsace (2005) Ingrid

so i arrived at pilar's house at 9pm and pilar was frantically frying up chicken while ingrid was stirring a vat of questionable white liquid which she said was a new dessert recipe she had seen in the daily metro newspaper. 

nothing was ready, no one was there .. but i was just happy to be with las chicas. 

i prepared pilar's famous salad which i've made so many times now (slightly varied) that i almost want to appropriate the name.  alki's THAI BOWL SALD because i always prepare it in my bamboo bowl that i bought in thailand.  except when i make it at pilar's house.  okay, maybe that name is misleading.  how about... salade sucre au chevre (translate: "sweet salad a la goat cheese".  sounds funnier in english... )??

anyway, by 10pm, the others - beth, diane, and the two spanish girls from pilar's work- had arrived and the food was all ready.  i was still unaware of the buttloads (shoutout to alice) of food to come, because when pilar served her INCREDIBLE spanish garlic, ham, and egg soup, i thought it was THE meal, and so i took a bit more than needed.  

after the epic soup, pilar comes out with the chicken à la moutarde.  say jigga what?  mustard chicken-- deeeeelicious.  and only 3 ingredients necessary.  creme fraiche, mustard with the little seeds in it, and chicken.  you put 'em all in a frying pan and voila, a french delicacy.  the french pride themselves on their fine cuisine, but that shit's easy!

by now, half the girls' pants are unbuttoned and we can't shut up about how full we are.  of course, there's the sweet salad a la goat cheese, a tomato-mozzarella salad (which we decided to abandon), and a quiche brought by beth, to finish... that is, before DESSERT.

of course you could just say, "oh it's just a salad", but when you pour melted goat cheese on it, it becomes more of a meal than a side-dish. 

like champions however, we bulldozed through the salad and the quiche, leaving practically nothing left on the table.

throughout our gorgefest, ingrid was doing her best to inebriate us with her fancy wines.  she brought a pinot grigiot from alsace (2005) that was... DIVINE.  we were all making moaning sounds as we sipped the wine...

and then it was time for dessert.

ingrid whips out her mysterious white liquid to which she adds some fried apple slices.. and WOW, it turned out to be IN-CRE-DI-BLE.

again.  the moaning sounds.

despite the fact that we were almost rolling off our chairs, we managed to continue with the marzipan cake that beth brought along with the mint chocolate chip ice cream i found at my new favorite store (PICARD: a sort of gourmet frozen foods store.  i don't think that concept exists in the US but picard ROCKS.  +1 for france).  

after ten minutes... the cake was gone.  

WE WERE SUPER HEROS.  or gluttonous chubbos. 

happy days. 


Sweet Salad à la Goat Cheese 
serves 6-8 people

Ingredients:

SALAD
1 head of leafy greenish/purple lettuce
1 green apple
1 pear
3-4 tomatoes
1/2 purple onion
1/2 cup of raisins
200 grams of CHEVRE (goat cheese)

DRESSING
olive oil
balsamic vinegar
mustard
honey
pinch of salt

I think it's pretty self-explanatory, no?  Wash and chop the lettuce.  Chop the apple, pear, onion, and tomatoes.  Mix them all together and add the raisins.  I'm not really sure about proportions for the dressing but just play around with the ingredients until you find a blend you like.  honey is key.  slice up the chevre and microwave it for about 20-30 seconds until it's slightly melted.  served each person the salad and dress it with the dressing and the melted chevre.  HEAVEN........

***** Recipes for Pilar's soup and Ingrid's apple in cider cream dessert are soon to come.  

bon ap'!



1 commentaire:

beth a dit…

Awesome! Such a cool event and blog. I don't have the female friends, kitchen or ingredients to pull any of this off, but I'm happy you do!