Cocktails and tapas

[magid]

Friends of mine had a small cocktail party Sunday night, billed as cocktails and tapas. HH and E are both doctors, with the income to have a nice lifestyle, which they definitely choose to do. They'd recently come back from an Italian vacation, including a week's rental of a villa, and a one-day cooking class. Some of the recipes were used for the party.

I can't give a review of the drinks, since all I had was the (soft) cider (they also had hard). There were many kinds of martinis available, in those wonderfully-shaped glasses. The ones that seemed most bizarre were chocolate ones, the glasses drizzled with some form of chocolate before the booze mixture was poured in. Maraschino cherries were noticeably absent in these.

The food, on the other hand, I sampled, rather too prodigiously. Wonderful things, all of them in little portions, so it's hard to know just how many of them you've eaten... (Really, I do have to find the HTML for bulleted lists. [My laziness now counteracted. Thanks, Queue.])

• pita wedges with hummus. I heard that it was flavored in some way, but didn't try it, since (a) I didn't want to wash for bread [1], and (b) there were so many other thin gs of interest around.
  
• three kinds of cheese, a smelly Camembert, an Emmenthaler, and some third one that might've been Gouda, with a variety of crackers on which to put them.
  
• crudites with some white dip (another thing I didn't try).
  
• bake d brie en croute with raspberry jam. The jam was more sweet than raspberry, and some pieces didn't have jam at all. Still, very good, especially when still warm.
  
• homemade potato and red cabbage pierogis. I have never had anything like these, complet ely not like the frozen ones in the supermarket: the dough was flaky and wonderful.
  
• homemade borekas, both spinach and cheese ones (I have the vague idea that there might've been some potato ones of these, too, but I'm not sure). The cheese ones had sunflower seeds in them, which struck me as a bit odd, but worked.
  
• three kinds of foccaccia: onion, rosemary, and tomato (the last didn't come out), pre-cut in little squares. These were a bit saltier than I generally like, but still quite good.
  
• water crackers topped with lox (Sorry, smoked salmon. That sounds much snazzier.). There was some kind of soft white cheese barely there, but the essence was lox topped with dill or mini capers or a little piece of peeled lemon. Queue particularly liked these last.
  
• stuffed mushrooms. I don't think I've ever gotten tired of stuffed mushrooms; I'm not sure I'd want to know how many of these I had....

Later on, desserts came out with coffee:

• homemade biscotti, both chocolate-dipped and plain. The chocolate on these was great, and there were whole hazelnuts in them. Unfortunately, the second baking was a bit long... these were really really hard (one guest was unsure if she'd broken a tooth on one).
  
• a kind of Rosh Hashana cookie mad e in Rome, cylinders filled with a chopped fruit filling. They're really nice (in that non-chocolate-dessert sort of way), though I still find it bizarre that they are burdened with a name referring to the sticks used to expel Jews in a pogrom.... You opp ress us, we'll name a cookie after you? Too weird.
  
• chocolate-dipped cherries that had soaked in kirschwasser (cherry brandy). I hadn't realized they had any alcoholic content, so was surprised by the kick.

Oh, and there were other people ther e, some of whom I hadn't seen in a while, and nice conversation was had, and then it was time to roll home.

[1] religious fanatic again