I would love to cook different delicious elaborated dishes when I
make parties at home. But this is almost impossible because of 2
things. One thing is the logistics: too many people and too much food to
cook. The second and the most important one: you don't have the time to
make nice, well-decorated, scrumptious dishes (at least, I don't). So what I
do is focusing all my efforts on the aperitivo time.
For us aperitivo is THE TIME: time to wait for everybody to arrive,
time to catch up with everybody no matter where you will sit on the
table later on, time to be helped with the things left to
do before lunch and time to enjoy the first drinks of the meal until
food is fixed. And THIS IS THE TIME where our cooking skills show up.
We usually cook different small dishes that everybody will be able
to taste. We mix cold and hot ones. They are normally finger food to
make sure forks won't block the nice conversation you might have in that
moment (and that you might have it interrupted because of the food
service). One of my recent successes was Crudités
Ingredients
- 150 gr black olives
- 20 gr alcaparras
- 5 ml mustard
- 15 ml olive oil
- 1 ml lemon juice
The most important thing here is buying good quality black olives. The first time I made it I used pitted olives from an ordinary supermarket and the recipe isn't as tasty as with olives with pit bought in a good market.
The first thing is adding the black olives in the container (remove
the bones first). Add the capers and break them. It will take you 5
minutes more or less. You have to get a very smooth texture, like if it
was pate.
Then add the mustard and the lemon juice and mix it all
together. The key to get the pate texture is adding olive oil. I used 15
ml and it worked for me but I'm sure it depends also on the oil you
use. Just keep adding till you get that consistency.
When done, put the olivada in the fridge for 2 hours approximately and then you are ready to serve!
You can either spread the olivada on some bread, ready to be eaten,
or you can leave the olivada in the container and let people make it
for you.
Recipe: Olivada
