Dinner Club

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Taste of Thai

Thai Food

I’ve been wanting to make Thai food for our dinner club for a while now and our month to make it finally arrived!

I didn’t realize how easy it is to cook with curry. Our recipes had a lot of garlic, galangal, ginger, lemongrass, coriander, cilantro, fish sauce, and of course coconut milk. We bought most of the ingredients from 99 Ranch Market. Check out our photos, with recipes to follow!

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Drinks

Appetizers

Soup and Salad

Entree

Dessert

I’m glad we selected these recipes, they turned out great! Also, they didn’t need to be finished all at the same time, so we ended up eating over a 3 hour period. Another dinner club success!

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Cajun Boil and Football

Our August theme was Cajun food! My husband had to do some convincing for me to go with it, and I’m glad I gave in, it turned out great!

Darin and Vanessa have season tickets to the San Diego Chargers games and asked us if we could wanted to join them on the day we had our dinner scheduled. And wouldn’t you know that Cajun fare is the perfect tailgating food?!

We just Googled different Cajun Boil recipes and while we considered getting crawfish, we kept it simple and got crab legs instead. Here are recipes for the hush puppies and peach pies we made:

Hot and Spicy Hush Puppies
Bourbon Peach Hand Pies

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Related Articles

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Seafood in May

May’s seafood theme was great! Of the recipes we made, I enjoyed the crab cakes and risotto the most. Unfortunately, I do not have pics, so this post is all business and all about preserving the recipes we used so we can revisit them another time!

  • Cajun Crab Cakes– MAKE THESE! They are better than any crab cakes from ay restaurant.

Asparagus Risotto

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Life Has Become Too Busy!

The bad news: It’s been way too long since my last post.

The good news: we continue our monthly dinners with Darin & Vanessa and with great success!

I can’t even remember what the dinners were for the rest of 2011! Literally I’m sitting here with my husband, getting an equally blank stare when I ask what the themes were…

I DO know that for this year, we made a vegetarian dinner for January and a seafood theme for March. I’m going to add a separate entries for the dates we had the vegetarian and seafood themes!

Happy spring cooking!

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Vegetarian January

Happy New Year! This blog has become my go to for the recipes we’ve made that we want to make again. Forget browser bookmarks!

For a long time I had wanted to do a vegetarian themed menu. It took some serious coaxing before the husband would agree to it. But overall, it turned out great — even with the brief, wife-winning argument about how to deal with the lasagna noodles.

Here is the vegetarian menu:

Artichoke Crostini

Artichoke Crostini

The crostini was super easy and delicious.

Grilled Vegetable Salad

Grilled Vegetable Salad

Grilled vegetable salad looked good and was good. The minestrone felt healthy eating it.

Chocolate Cheesecake

Triple Chocolate Cheesecake

And the triple chocolate cheesecake, well, was over the top!

As for the lasagna, I probably would not make it again. It was OK, but it didn’t have the wonderful visual appeal I was hoping for. I did win the argument with N’Gai about the noodles though. The recipe called for no boil noodles. I don’t care what the box says, I am not a fan of not boiling noodles! I think it makes them chewy and they never turn out right. I ALMOST pulled the, “I’m Italian, you aren’t.” card, but decided not to go there. It was the right choice in the end but overall I think the recipe could use the addition of lots of vegetables.

Definitely make the crostini, grilled vegetable salad, and minestrone!