Emma's Eats: Dinner Party

I know all of you out there are super curious about what I would serve at a dinner party, aren't you? Lucky for you I just took pictures of the food at a lovely little dinner party we had here! It was a low key, light friday dinner for 7, in case you were wondering. This is a bit of a different kind of post that is less about the cooking and more about the eating, I will however link you to the tomato soup recipe, so there you go. I feel the need to mention the fact that it is snowing right now for some reason (this is turning into a grab bag of a post, I may as well throw in a few pictures of Hazel while I'm at it.....). The fact that it is snowing is not actually relevant to my life as I neither drive a plow nor do I go to school, so it's not as if I am wishing for a snow day, but it is pretty, and I do enjoy throwing snowballs for Hazel and watching her either eat them with surprising gusto or being very befuddled when they seem to vanish into thin air. Where was I? O yes, dinner party.

For starters I made these lovely twirlys, and yes that is their technical name and yes they are very easy to make. All it is is a box of frozen puff pastry, some pesto and goat cheese. Thaw the pastry, unfold it, spread pesto on one sheet and goat cheese on the other, roll each of them up, slice and bake.

For the salad course (not that I really believe in distinct courses unless you have waiters and chefs who are going to do all the necessary work to make that happen, we just serve everything at once) we had a spinach salad with figs, spiced pecans, blue cheese crumbles and a sherry vinaigrette. I was a bit suspicious about the figs, but they balanced the flavors nicely.

We also had cheesy bread, here it is about to go in the oven. This time I used a mix of cheddar and gruyere cheese, and seasoned it with basil and garlic powder. Delicious. There was some debate about if some of the bread should remain plain, after myself and both my parents declared we would not eat the boring bread it was decided it all must be cheesed, which was a good call.

The 'main course' is this sherried tomato soup. You should probably make it this weekend. It is from the Pioneer Woman, who I absolutely love. I am making these cupcakes this weekend for the Super Bowl and I may be more excited about them than the game (I do like football, it's just that I don't feel a very strong connection to either of the teams, and the cupcakes have 3 different kinds of chocolate......).

Last but not least, a Bakewell tart for dessert. I developed a taste for these lovely almondy, raspberry tarts when i was in Ireland, they are just so good. This is a Nigella recipe from her book How to Eat. So there you have it, an Emma's Eats style dinner party. And now for some nice pictures of a crazy dog, just 'cause.