Category Archives: Menus

Yesterday we had a BBQ in honor of Mike’s birthday. I didn’t make anything new, but IMHO what I made was quite good and would recommend it for your (or my) next BBQ. Lola brought the salad, and I served chips with salsa and guacamole and my great potato salad, but otherwise all there was was protein (and birthday cake):
-Hot dogs
-BBQ chicken
–Thyme marinated tri-tip
–Tofu Satay
I trimmed and coated the tri-tip with coarse salt before marinating it, and it came out perfectly.
I served the tofu satay plain (without peanut sauce), but my vegetarian (and non-vegetarian) friends loved it – so much so that they took the leftovers to grill at home 🙂 I didn’t have Madeira wine for the recipe this time, so I used port instead.

I think that with my finishing of this Cypriot Menu I’m off the Mediterranean for a while – though I still have to make desserts from the Baleares to finish off the area. I ate a lot of Mediterranean food in May and June: Balearic, Cretan, Cypriot, Corsican, Caprese and Catalan. Though Mediterranean food is great, I can’t say that I’m sorry to leave this region to explore others.
Marga’s International Recipes.

I finished this Cretan menu over a month ago, but only now I wrote up the last recipe. Cretan food is very similar to Greek food and it’s, therefore, quite good. Check out the recipes at:
http://www.marga.org/food/int/crete/
As for this week, I will be finishing off Cyprus and hopefully making a dessert from Croatia and another from the Baleares (to finish off those cuisines). One of my friend gave me a South American cookbook, so after that I’d like to move on to Colombia. There are a lot of “C”s I want to cover after that, at least two of them in dinner-party format. It’ll take a while.

I’ve just finished cooking and writing up my Catalan and Corsican menus.
I’d specially recommend the Catalan Civet de Porc and the Corsican cheese & mint beignets.
Next on the agenda, Baleares (I’d skipped it before), Chilean & Cretan food.

I’ve just posted a couple of international menus that I’ve cooked in the last couple of weeks:
My Comorian Menu features a typical fish stew, a roasted chicken with western and south Asian influences and some very basic but very good banana fritters.
My Champagnoise Menu includes an amazing leek tart and a Champagne version of coq au vin.

I have just posted three new menus from my International Cooking project. They are:
–Auvergnat
Amazing food from this region in France. I didn’t cook it earlier because I hadn’t been able to find recipes.
–Colonial
Surprisingly modern food from colonial America
–Curaçao
A journey from Asia to Africa that is very Caribbean
In the next few weeks I’ll be working on Champenois, Comorian and Corsican recipes.

Delicious food from Sri Lanka, including mulligatawny soup, a lamb curry and a pretty western dessert. Find them at:
http://www.marga.org/food/int/ceylon/

Yesterday, we had some friends over to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birthday. I decided to have a tea party, and the following is the menu. One of my friends is vegan, so I got a couple of vegan treats for him – which ended up being the stars of the table. Here is what I served:
–Harrods No. 14 English Breakfast tea
I got this at the London airport last year, and I was quite happy with its full, balanced taste. A good black tea.
–Chicken Salad sandwiches
–Tomato & Avocado sandwiches

on vegan whole wheat bread, with hummus. They were good, 2yo Jaime loved them, but I thought they tasted too much of hummus. Next time I’ll try to use less (maybe only spread it on one slice of the bread)
–Trader Joe’s Mushroom Turnovers
–Iced and plain Rolled sugar cookies
in heart and Darwin fish shapes (see below). I wasn’t thrilled about the taste of the cookies, but they held their shape beautifully – great for the skinny legs of the Darwin fish.
The icing recipe was great and I’m posting it next.
–Vegan orange poppy-seed cookies
Very, very tasty, recipe to follow
–Trader Joe’s Apple Streudel
This vegan dessert was delicious, a little bit on the sweet side, but with a great flaky buttery (but made with no butter) crust. Vegan or not, you should definitely try it.
–Birthday Cake!
What’s a birthday without a birthday cake? My friend Fanny brought it, she made it from scratch, and it was delicious. We sang the birthday boy “Happy Birthday”, the kids blew the candles and devoured the cake.
And that was it. We watched the beginning (“Nace la Tierra” or “The Earth is born”) of “Érase una vez el hombre“, a French series, translated into Spanish, that I watched when I was a kid. This cartoon series records the history of human kind from the beginning of the earth until the 70’s, when the series was made. The series is not always historically accurate, but it’s a great introduction for children to history. The beginning is particularly good as it shows the evolution of mankind from a cell to a human being.
Katrina read a book on the history of the universe to the children, and Fanny read parts of a biography of Darwin. Mike played the Monty Python universe song, and everyone had fun and learned a little bit about Darwin. Alas, the kids (the oldest being 7 1/2 yo) can’t quite understand the theory of evolution yet. I didn’t learn it until I was in college, so I can’t fault them for that.

Marga’s Party Recipes

Continuing my project of cooking International Food, in recent weeks I’ve made Californian and Chadian food. Pasta, short ribs and even duck were part of the former’s menu, while the latter featured a delicious roasted chicken and an ever-present peanut stew.

My menu for the Central African Republic is now online. It features a chicken couscous, beef in cumin sauce and ginger cakes.
I’ll be cooking more international food in the weeks to come – now that I’m caught up putting up the recipes. Next stop is Chad. After that I’ll be going back in the alphabet to A and cooking Arizonan cuisine (I just found an Arizonan cookbook at the library).
My international cooking project.