Steak, Scotch and Cigar Party Part 2: Appetizers and Dinner

I've intended to post this for a while, but apparently I'm a little slow in getting the ball rolling with this whole blog thing. I blame my distaste for taking, downloading, formatting and then uploading pictures. Seriously, it takes way longer than it should. Anyway, here is the rest of the deliciousness we ate that night! Thanks again to Anna for the pictures!!

For the first appetizer, I went with shrimp and chorizo skewers on the bbq. I had intended to do this for the party last year, but V bought the wrong (not-dried) kind of chorizo, so we ended up pan-frying it. It was delicious, but not exactly what I had intended. As I was in the planning stages, I ended up at physio reading my Bon Appetit and came upon this recipe. I was amazed! Not only was it shrimp & sausage skewers, but with a smoked paprika glaze. Smoked paprika is a fairly recently discovery of mine, and I LOVE it! These lived up to my highest expectations, except that I don't think it's worth saving half the glaze for sauce... it's not smooth enough (maybe my emulsifying technique is lacking) and they really do have enough flavour on their own. I made a few very minor changes to this - I didn't have enough fresh thyme, so I used some dried. I didn't have sherry vinegar, so I used balsamic and added about a teaspoon of maple syrup for some sweetness. I used 3 tsp of regular smoked paprika and 2 of hot smoked paprika. I made them again for my birthday dinner using all hot, and found them a bit spicy for my taste, but still delicious.

Our other appetizer was bacon-wrapped scallops - a repeat from last year. These are delicious. They go wonderfully with scotch. If you are hosting a scotch dinner I cannot recommend highly enough that you make them. I suggest pre-cooking the bacon in the microwave slightly, then broiling. Unfortunately we did no precook and my oven decided it wanted to overheat and shut down. V finished cooking them on the bbq while I panicked that my oven was broken. The bacon was definitely soft, but they were still absolutely delicious!

Dinner was steak, roasted garlic mashed potatoes, barbecued asparagus and orange-spinach salad with whiskey dressing. For the meat, we went to Costco and bought a whole tenderloin, which V cut into nice thick steaks:

And then cooked to perfection:

For roasted asparagus, I toss one bunch of asparagus (obviously more here) with 1-2 tbsp of olive oil and some coarse sea-salt and fresh ground pepper in a loaf pan. For larger amounts like we did here, it's definitely easier to roll it in oil on a cookie sheet. V barbecues it till soft and slightly charred and it is absolutely delicious - our favourite side dish when we are barbecuing pretty much anything!

The roasted garlic mashed potatoes didn't turn out perfectly texture-wise - they were slightly lumpy (wrong kind of potato I think - what's your favourite to use for mashed?) The flavour on the other hand was excellent. I got the instructions from my brother's friend Nick who is a fantastic chef. Garlic mashed potatoes are my brother David's favourite thing, so Nick gave me the recipe to make for his birthday and here I share it with you with his presumed permission. He suggests peeling a whole head of garlic, putting it in a small pot and covering it with olive oil. Simmer at low heat until garlic is really soft. Reduce some 35% cream until it is thickened, then mash the garlic in the cream and add it to the potatoes. Here you can see the potatoes (served in the pot - we're classy like that) as part of the buffet we set up on the counter.

The salad recipe can be found here along with some other recipes I haven't tried yet. I followed it pretty closely, though I didn't bother with the butter lettuce. I highly recommend taking the time to roll the goat cheese rounds in ground almonds - it added such a nice textural and visual component to the salad! I confess that due to time constraints I used canned beets here, but I think they worked just fine for the salad.

All in all an absolutely delicious evening - both food and scotch-wise! The company certainly didn't hurt either - it was overall a fantastic night and I think everyone enjoyed themselves almost as much as I did (some maybe more, but as a favour to them I will refrain from posting pictures of the kitchen dance party!)