We had a couple missing in action, but I won’t name any names (Keith, Jen).

Here are some takeaways from this feast:

• a 55 gallon drum of guacamole would not be enough – a huge bowl was devoured within minutes
• ditto on sweet potato chips
• make a list of what you’re supposed to take with you when catering an event such as this, and check it three times; we forgot a myriad of ingredients: 5 avocados (see above), quart of cream, eggs, two huge heads of romaine, and probably a couple of things I’m still forgetting
• when empanada dough made from ripe plantains requires the empanadas to be soft (from roasting about 45 minutes at 350 F), they really need to be soft; I rushed and added cream (fat) to the mixture to make it doughy, which does not work if you’re going to be frying them! We’ll be doing this one again soon.
• taking the fryer is a good idea! If you run out of things to fry, you can start frying up shoes, severed fingers, whatever for wholesome party fun!
• ’tis best to take the time and bring implements to make a proper fry station, i.e., dry-wet-dry dipping for things like chiles rellenos. using shallow bowls and your fingers makes for splotchy batter coverage
• definitely no drinking whilst you’re preparing the feast, especially in the days leading up; we wouldn’t have gotten half the dishes done if we had been
• tune in BeatBlender on SomaFM and crank it as loud as it will go while cooking!!! Loud deep house music creates the best energy in the kitchen ever. Perhaps we can start powering cars on house music?

My personal favorites:

• the roasted tomatillo serrano salsa rocks! Tangy, zesty, spicy with a hint of sweetness. This is a distinctive green color.
• the roasted tomatillo chipotle salsa – tangy and spicy with a touch of sweet. This one is mahogany colored (uses dried chipotles not ones in adobo).
• enchilada suiza – made this a gillion times and it’s always a fave, esp for such a simple dish
• guacamole always a fave – my shortcut on this one is to make the fresh chopped tomato jalapeño salsa as a stand-alone dish, add several tablespoons of the salsa to mash fresh avocados with a fork, chop up several cloves of garlic and mince with coarse salt, throw it all together and voilá!
• simply made, freshly fried corn chips with any salsa

Finally here are some pics from the party! Click on an image to zoom in and get a full description.

Until next time . . .

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Since all this technology work makes a guy hungry, I poached up some chicken breast, made a quick guacamole by fork crushing a ripe avocado with yesterday’s Chopped Tomato and Serrano Salsa and some extra garlic and adding a little lime juice. To that I added some red romaine lettuce, grated chihuahua cheese and the aforementioned salsa and threw it on some steamed corn tacos and commenced hodgering (yes that’s a word my family has used forever, so I added it to urbandictionary.com myself – see here).

Take a look at the mess of ingredients for this feast on my cutting board (excuse the crappy ass phone pic):

In any case, I’m going to check out and go to bed now. I’m listening to one of my other favorite Internet radio stations, BeatBlender from SomaFM as I type this, but I think the DJ is getting a little whiff of the crack pipe this late at night.

Look for tomorrow’s progress!

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