Party Classics
The following dishes are well received both at our own parties and as contribution to other parties' buffets.
Bobotie
For the recipe for this delicious South-African pumpking casserole I'd like to point to page 12 of my Perl Programming textbook, where it serves as an every-day example of an algorithm. (So far in German only... sorry!)
Teriyaki-style Cocktail Sticks
There's virtually like a Trillion or so teriyaki-recipes out there on the web -- here's yet another one:
For the marinade, let
100 mL of soy sauce
100 mL of sake or cooking sherry
50 g of honey or sugar
1 clove of garlic (roughly chopped) and
2 cm of fresh ginger (roughly chopped)
boil in a saucepan until the mixture starts to become viscous. Add
one lime's juice and allow the marinade to cool. Use it for marinating beef and/or chicken, diced into bite-sized pieces (approx. 750 g all together -- organic, if possible!). After a couple or so of hours, thread meat and pieces of
2 to 3 bunches of spring onions onto cocktail sticks, put on an oven rack, sprinkle with
sesame seeds and bake at high temperature for approx. 10 minutes.
(Note: Recently, I accidently also threaded a slice of fresh ginger onto one stick, which resulted in some kind of flavour explosion while eating it -- maybe this is a variant worth noting...)
Spicy nuts
We tried this with almonds and cachews, but peanuts should work, too.
In a hot frying pan, toast the nuts in a small dash of olive until they start getting brown. Add 1 - 2 table spoons of sugar and stir continuously until the sugar starts turning into caramel. Finally, add some spices (like coriander seeds, cumin, cinnamon and a hint of chili), stir once more and remove the nuts from the pan. Add salt to your liking -- but mind that most canned nuts are salted already!