Party-Time!

A happy weekend to everyone! The fridge-installation-saga continues here, and I have more bizarre photos to share soon. But I'm almost a week past a wonderful party that needs sharing. 

Phil's gorgeous, wonderful daughter is turning 40! So we celebrated in style.

Pictured here with her mom, another awesome person and the hostess of the party at her beautiful home way up the hill where the snow is deeper.

In my last post, I showed Phil digging into crab during the party--he and our neighbor went out for the last time this season. Here's Phil's daughter's fiance modeling the unusual tools that were on the table for crab-cracking:

Vice grips, wrenches... His t-shirt says 'I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.'

And here's Buddy, their dog, looking very pleased with himself.

We are so fortunate in our extended family/group of friends here. Parties are always sumptuous events, full of laughter and good stories. If it's someone's birthday, it's often even more fun because of the anticipation and picking out gifts ahead of time. For this reason, I think I prefer when it's not my birthday (which is most of the time, of course). I love to pick out gifts and also to create edibles that would be particularly enjoyed by the person celebrated.

This was a sumptuous party for sure. Other than the surprise appearance of crab, the main course was spaghetti, so in addition to my usual green salad, I brought along a raw lasagna!

Credit here must go to Bitt's recent lasagna post for the inspiration. Anyone who knows me knows that I may be congenitally incapable of following a recipe, but that I read recipes for inspiration like storybooks. The most intriguing part of Bitt's recipe to me was her use of fresh tomatoes instead of a sundried-tomato-based mairnara. I mandolined the best tomatoes I could find into paper-thin curls and together with the marinaded mushrooms, they provided great texture variety. Cashew cheese is always a good thing, and I made a very garlicky pesto to complement it. Everyone loved this! It should be said,  however, that not a few people had the instinct that the whole thing would be great spread on bread or crackers. For most people, zucchini doesn't seem to cut it as noodles (no pun intended). I think zucchini is an awesome vegetable: neutral flavored and with a great texture, so much potential for raw cuisine. Unfortunately, I really don't like it! I want to like it, I try to like it, I marinade, rinse and drain it before use, but I can never get away from this bitter aftertaste it has. I've never had raw zucchini to compare to the cooked nondairy-cream of zucchini soups I used to make years ago. It's disappointing to me, but not tragic: there are so many other good things!

Good things like dessert! I mentioned before that the peanut butter mousse brownie had been requested and that I'd made it with a more decadent brownie recipe, and used some of the extra filling to make a no-sugar and no-caffeine white chocolate version too. Well, here they are!

The tops are garnished with chopped almonds.

For the white one, I made a very thin and simple crust of mac nuts, shredded coconut, xylitol, cacao butter and vanilla. The peanut butter mousse part was the same recipe as for the chocolate one. And I made the topping from coconut milk (homemade), coconut cream powder and cacao butter. I didn't include enough cacao butter, so the topping fell down the sides at room temperature, but that looks pretty too.

Everyone who had had the brownie-cake the first time said that it was even better this time--all of it, not just the brownie. That was so validating: I followed the recipe that I'd posted here on the blog, and probably followed it more precisely than my first time through, when I was eyeballing and inventing. And I love the white choc version too. There's something so adorable about a 5-inch cake pan and the slices it yields. This was a wonderful opportunity to 'christen' my birthday gift of nesting springform pans--well, two out of three of them anyway. Now to find something for the 7-inch one too.

Look at Spring approaching so fast! Enjoy that wonderful full moon this weekend. We may go across the Bay here early next week, take advantage of the huge equinoctial tides. A beautiful weekend and lots of clean air to everyone!