In my last post, I mentioned the tapas party that we enjoyed with dear friends and family. I have been so appreciating the encouragement to bring foods that
I like to these kinds of events: until recently, I'd bring a salad just to make sure there'd be 'something' I could eat and put all my energies into making things I couldn't, of a more mass appeal.
The specific instruction was not to go 'over the top,' lots of little, simple dishes. So I thought four things was a reasonable cap: two mains and two desserts.
I made a version of raw samosas with banana tamarind dipping sauce, loosely based (as in, I don't have the book) on that in
Raw Food Real World
...
...and for the other 'main,' I finally got on the Socca bandwagon!
I made
Pure2Raw's beautiful spinach socca, with a creamy spinach salad to top it!
As for desserts, I was so excited to make marzipan cookies--one of my favorite flavors--based on the recipe in
Everyday Raw Desserts
but replacing the agave with xylitol and stevia...
...and I made authentic Spanish-style fig-bread: pictured on the left of the white cake below.
Here it is again, chilling next to the rolled marzipans on our freezer.
This was a very simple two parts dried figs to one part soaked/dehydrated walnuts plus a little special honey, pinch of salt and drop of anise extract. It mimics the 'fig bread' by Matiz that can be found in gourmet stores for a high price but is delicious and simple to make.
Note the absence of chocolate in the desserts area? Good to change things up, and better for my body...
I really didn't think I 'went over the top,' but there were definitely some busy spaces in our tiny cabin on Friday!
Here are the samosa filling (pulsed cauliflower and peas mellowing in a curry sauce), walnuts for the fig bread, raspberry jam filling for the marzipan, all 'dehydrating' on the floor in front of our heater...
Before I go into the other dishes in more detail, what do you do when you're fixing up a whole bunch of food and lunchtime rolls around? To me, it's a good sign when you can take a break to have a lunch, rather than just nibbling here and there. My 'large cauliflower' for samosas was too much for the curry sauce (fortunately I didn't throw it all in at once). So my lunch was a bunch of pulsed cauliflower and a handful of spinach leaves, sauced with a little piece of avocado, a little coconut kefir, and chlorella, curry powder and nutritional yeast. Oh, and some cilantro.
You don't think it looks pretty? Oh, me loves green so very much...
OK--after lunch, and after ice-driving practice, samosa-wrapping, now that the filling had had a good few hours to mellow and meld. I added a bunch of coarsely chopped cilantro to the filling.
For the wraps, I 'cheated.' I don't have a dehydrator (other than in front of the heater) and don't have access to quantities of young coconuts, so making wrappers out of dehydrated young coconut didn't seem sensible. I used rice-paper spring roll wrappers instead. Can you see the wrapper blotting on the towel?
I've never used these before and found the wrapping procedure to be really fun. Of course, it's a bit of a cultural stretch, putting samosa inside spring roll wrappers: but hey, this was a tapas (i.e. Spanish food) party, so I could just call it fusion.
The banana-tamarind dipping sauce was very spicy and delicious, and complemented the samosas well. I'd definitely make the samosa filling and the tamarind sauce again just separately, to enjoy. And the wraps definitely bear repeating too.
Socca! Years ago, long before I'd ever heard of socca, I used to make myself flatbreads out of chickpea flour. I've been reading about socca on other blogs for sometime but had never felt moved to try it, partly because of doing all-raw, partly being carbophobic, partly knowing that Phil, who dislikes chickpeas, wouldn't be a fan. But
this recipe that Pure2Raw shared recently really called out to me and the Mediterranean setting of the evening was perfect.
Batter ready to go in the oven...
...came out crusty and hearty-looking...
And I followed the socca part of the recipe to the letter! Me, who am congenitally incapable of following recipes. So, of course, I didn't follow the salad recipe to the letter...
I didn't have nutmeg or basil, but I did have fresh tarragon. Oh, and I replaced the hempseeds with walnuts. You know what? Tarragon and tahini is a
wonderful flavor combination that I will definitely use again.
Yummy... Thanks so much,
Pure2Raw ladies! Even the wheat-bread-lovers loved it.
Marzipan...intense almond flavor with a berry contrast. Based on coconut flour and cashews/mac nuts. Here I am
following tweaking a recipe again!
I used less xylitol syrup than the amount of agave called for, but still had to add quite a lot of extra coconut flour to make it a dough as opposed to liquidy.
I also probably didn't roll it out quite flat enough and when I rolled the pastry over the jam, I had to do some repair work. The substitutions may have affected the pliability also, although of course chilling is no problem here: just set it outside for a minute or two!
But bottom line: marzipan is something I adore, and will definitely try to make again and can tweak the different sweeteners and texturers: I have some more ideas. Even as a first attempt, this was so good! Intense almond flavor, sweet and rich, without being tooth-hurtingly sweet.
And of course, there were about two dozen other dishes on the table too!
Questions:
Are you more likely to eat something you 'shouldn't' at a gathering with huge selection of dishes?
I'm lucky, in that most things that make me feel sick I actually dislike. (And, Phil would add, there are lots of things that might be good for me that I also dislike!) Obviously, chocolate is an exception, but it doesn't make me sick to my stomach, just my adrenals. The only other exception for me is bell peppers. I never eat them raw because they make me sick right away. But when they're roasted, I can sometimes cope with a little, and I just love the taste. Somehow, the celebratory, diverse spirit of tapas encouraged me to eat several pieces of roasted bell pepper, and my tummy did not thank me for it! How silly, when there were so many other good options... But even so, I ate a fraction of the diversity that everyone else had, so I guess I was careful...
When you make a big batch of something, do you like it when there are leftovers?
If it's something Phil loves, I'm happy for there to be leftovers. If it's more my kind of food, I'm ambivalent about the leftovers thing. I love leftovers, especially as often the flavors meld over time. But if there are too many leftovers and they are perishable, I can feel overwhelmed, since there's nothing I hate more than waste. The day after a rich dinner, I usually want to keep things very simple food-wise. To be honest, I also know that everyone else can eat much richer food than I can regularly, and worry about calories, etc. However, I've been enjoying my leftovers this time! And of course, if it's something that freezes, the time pressure is off and you can just enjoy it when you wish.
Much love!
