Marathon Eating: Pre-Season Cooking and Streching of the Stomachs

One of my good friends is going to D.C. next semester, and I'm going to miss her and her affinity for talking about food, cooking and eating delicious food- and then talking about it some more.

Thus, we decided to spend the entire day cooking and eating delicious food. When I say the entire day, I mean nine hours. Straight. It was our personal heaven.

We had quite an ambitious menu, and spent way too much money at the supermarket, but it was great!

-Dates Wrapped in Maple Bacon (a slight variation on dátiles)

-One of my roommates' mom's 8-Layer Mexican Dip

-Caramelized Onion Crostini (we made this recipe all by ourselves!)

-Red Velvet Cookie Sandwiches

-Coconut Cake

-Roasted Chestnuts

First, I must say that Roasted Chestnuts are very overrated, but grew on me after a few. There's an entire song dedicated to them, so we thought we'd give them a whirl and have some out-of-body Christmas experience. It was quite disappointing. They reminded us of lima beans... Next time, we were thinking of sauteeing them with butter and adding some cinnamon and sugar, which you can never go wrong with! Anyone have any suggestions for them?

Erica's mom's 8-Layer Dip was so delicious! The recipe had called for 1 cup of mayonnaise and 1 cup of sour cream, but we just doubled the sour cream since neither of us like mayonnaise. What really made the recipe was the sour cream mixed with a packet of Taco Seasoning. We also decided that next time we might only add one or one-and-one-half cans of refried beans, instead of two. And maybe more tomatoes, or even a layer of salsa, since I love tomatoes so much. The other layers were avacado, olives, and cheese. Yum!

The Caramelized Onion Crostini was amazing! I'm bad with the exact measurements since we eyeballed, but I'll give it a shot:

-2 tbs butter

-3 c finely diced yellow onion

-1 tbs fresh sage, finely cut

-3 tbs flour

-3/4 c dry white wine

-2/3 c Low Sodium Chicken Broth

-Salt, pepper

We let the mixture get nice and thick, and after it cooled a bit, piled it on top of freshly toasted Italian bread. We concluded after that maybe we should have let the wine cook off a bit more, and maybe should have added a touch more broth. Overall, it was awesome, and I think Lauren may be making it for her family's Christmas Eve Appetizer Cook-Off. It's a real winner.

The Red Velvet Cookie Sandwiches, off of the Food Network, were pretty good, but we ran into some trouble since we forgot to grease the sheets before we baked. We tried to cut the cream cheese icing recipe in half, but it still tasted too much like cream cheese for our liking, and so we kept adding sugar to our liking. The cookies were also huge, so we cut them in half to make moon-like sandwiches instead of monstrosities that would make us ill. Overall, it was delicious and could be a real crowd-pleaser.

The Coconut Cake. I personally am a huge fan of coconut, cake, and icing, and when the three are combined, I turn into a monster. We had this cake at the end of the day, and so we didn't have very much room, but it was delicious! We did not have two round cake pans, so we used one large rectangular pan and cut it in half to stack the cakes. Icing was much easier than I had expected, and we used the recipe for icing from JoyofBaking.com instead of the recipe that went along with the cake recipe. The cake recipe was from Paula Deen, and was definitely decadent and delicious. A+!

I'm going to miss Lauren while she's off politicizing and all that, but I know it won't be long before we blow all of our money and partake in marathon eating again.