Good Eats = Great Party

What's a guy to do when he and his wife appear on the Food Network? Why throw a viewing party, that's what!

I tend to go way overboard when people come over to eat at our house. I just get really excited about cooking for parties, as it allows me to use more interesting methods and ingredients that aren't practical for two people. It also allows me to make a table-full of less-lite foods without eating the whole spread. Heck, if I can't get thin I can at least make my friends fat.

This party also coincided with a building frustration that I've only been able to blog about convenience food in the last few months. So I said "to heck with it," took a half day off work and pulled out the gourmet skills!

Actually, my theme was a sort of "Gourmet Hawaiian Junk Food." This is a little less specific than it sounds. Basically, I'd wanted to harness the Asian flavors I've been experimenting with as of late while exploring the world of flavors from our recent trip to Maui (that's a different post). As you can see, we created quite a spread.

This picture almost didn't happen. It seems that "but I want to blog about it" isn't a good enough excuse to keep 20 people from eating. Clockwise from the bottom, we have shrimp and mango summer rolls, Hawaiian musubi, a selection of brownies (regular and low-fat) and chocolate-covered mac-nuts, veggies, fruit and Hawaiian BBQ chicken mini-sandwiches compliments of my little brown egg. My favorite was the musubi (that's a different post), but the crowd preferred the summer rolls.

I know it's not exactly Hawaiian or junk food, but I also didn't want to make too many heavy appetizers and I thought this would be a perfect compliment to the other two meaty dishes. Light, refreshing and flavorful, it tasted as good as it looked.

I snagged the recipe from Epicurious, with a few changes. First, I cheated and used fresh cooked shrimp instead of boiling my own, substituting smaller shrimp (40-60/lb.) because that's what the seafood counter had. I also omitted the mint leaves because I don't have the luxury of an herb garden, and I didn't want to give my first born to the market for a handful of leaves.

Finally, I skipped the dipping sauce and instead concocted a mixture of soy, fish, and chili sauce with a little brown sugar to add some sweetness. I didn't measure, I just started out with copious amounts of the soy and tasted my way from there. Go easy on the fish sauce. A little goes a long way and, as one guest accurately noted, it "smells like fresh cat ass."

All in all, it was an easy, if time consuming, recipe to prepare. The good news is that the entire recipe, as prepared without sauce, is a meager 18 points (I made 12 small rolls instead of 8 large ones). That's a LOT of food, and would make an excellent dinner for 4. It was a little hard to find rice paper wrappers, but a quick trip to the local Japanese grocer solved that problem. You have a Japanese grocer near you, don't you?

The party was a success, and Jenny and I basked in our 30 seconds of fame. Everything turned out terrific, which is an occasion to celebrate as I usually don't meet my personal standards. It's tremendously satisfying when things turn out exactly as intended. Not bad for a Wednesday night!