Cooking Again - 2

Spanish style shrimp with toasted pasta

Fairly close on the heals of the meal described in my last post, we had our new friends Marianna and Nigel for dinner.

I was a little time constrained, so I recycled the hummus tahini from earlier in the week (actually I made new chickpeas and added the refrigerated tahini sauce). See my previous post for photo, which is close enough.

Accompanying that was my home-developed ricotta, sun-dried tomato and lemon zest spread.

Bobby Jay's ricotta, sun-dried tomato and lemon zest spread

For dinner, we started with my own corn soup, served with crushed hazelnuts and a few drops of hazelnut oil,

Bobby Jay's corn soup

and continued with Spanish style shrimp with toasted pasta, a great recipe from America's Test Kitchen that I have made often. See the picture at the top.

Dessert was an apricot galette. Here I used Gordon Hamersley's recipe for peach galette (from Bisto Cooking at Home), but substituted pistachios for cornmeal in the dough, substituted apricots for peaches to take advantage of the former's short season, and topped the fruit with coarsely chopped pistachios. Despite being a bit crumbly, the apricot/pistachio mix was a success.

Apricot galette with lots of pistachios

A good time was had by all, and a leisurely at-home meal provided ample time for bonding with our new friends. In the end, this is a major reason for cooking at home.

Bobby Jay