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DigsMagazine.com.
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last-minute
party
food
by Yee-Fan Sun
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2 3
continued from page 2
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• veggies and dip |
My favorite
dip, made with caramelized onions, takes me 20-30 minutes to
slowly cook those onions to perfection, then 2 days to let the flavors
of the dip properly meld. The sad truth is that my second favorite dip
is just as popular with friends, and takes about 30 seconds to throw
together. Yup, the good old onion soup mix stirred into sour cream makes
for a pretty darn tasty dip, and no one except the total food snob can
ever resist from scarfing it down. Personally, I far prefer it to any
ready-made supermarket dip I’ve tasted; if stirring powdered soup into
sour cream is more effort than you can muster, though, flavored cream
cheese or boursin cheese makes a good ready-to-go dip for raw veggies
– just make sure your veggies are sturdy enough to scoop up the cheese
easily. You can also cut down on your prep time by serving the dip with
ready-to-eat, no peeling and cutting required, baby carrots.
• frozen hors-d’oeuvres
|
If you happen to have a batch of homemade miniature quiches sitting
around in your freezer, by all means serve them. But for anyone who’s
not a perfect Martha Stewart clone, cheat a little: take a trip to the
frozen foods section of your favorite market, which will no doubt reveal
a dazzling array of ready-to-pop-in-the-oven appetizers – spanokopita,
mini tartlets, whatever -- that require no more work from you than
throwing the goodies out onto a baking sheet, and reheating them for
fifteen to twenty minutes.
Add
in any two of the following …
• bag of potato chips: A bowl of good potato chips, or if
you’re feeling like a fancy-pants, those bags of chips that include an
assortment of taro root, sweet potato, cassava and other potato-like
offerings – they look beautiful and taste yummy. Whatever you choose,
please, for the love of god, don’t serve the chips straight out of the
bag. Pour them into a big bowl before setting them out for all your
friends to gorge on.
• tortilla chips and salsa: Remember what I said about serving
the potato chips? Same goes for chips and salsa.
• bag of pretzels
• bowl of nuts
Plus one of
the following …
• big bowl of fresh strawberries – best in season, when
they’re cheap and sweet, during spring
• big bowl of fresh cherries – best in season, when they’re
cheap and sweet, during summer
• big bowl of seedless grapes – pretty much always good.
o
o o
Even
when you’re doing the semi-spontaneous party, though, a tiny bit of
planning can help heaps. Take five minutes to decide what you need to
buy, make a shopping list, swing by your favorite market, and once you
get home, you should be able to get everything out onto the table in
thirty minutes or so.
o
easy
party food | easy munchables | host(ess)
with the mostest | the
spontaneous host
--------------------------->
lounge . nourish
.
host . laze
. home .
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