Woohoo Fondue

Last night, I hosted a fondue party for our monthly dinner club. We usually meet on Sunday but since May is such a busy month, it worked out to have it on a Friday night. This made food prep a little more rushed than usual but I think everything turned out great. I've been wanting to make fondue since my Mom got me a triple crock-pot (yes, 3 crock-pots attached to each other!) for hosting our family Thanksgiving dinner. I made classic gruyere fondue, feta fondue and, of course, chocolate fondue for dessert.

For the cheese fondues, we had cubed olive, sourdough and rustic white bread, potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, bell peppers, tomatoes, olives, artichokes, apples and pears to dip. Preparing so many items for dipping took much more time than I anticipated, but it was worth it.

Although everyone enjoyed the cheese, the hit of the party was the chocolate fondue. Everyone just stood and hovered over it, not willing to take their eyes off the molten chocolate! We dipped: strawberries, bananas, marshmallows, Vanilla wafers, mandarin oranges, and homemade sponge cake.

It's a great that Ihab had fondue forks, otherwise I don't know how we would've made it work, but everything fell into place (triple crock pot, great cheese and chocolate, and fondue forks) to make this dinner club a success.

Stuff Mike and Kim Like: #3 Dinner Parties

I know dinner parties was listed at #90 on the Stuff White People Like blog, but Kim and I like dinner parties so much we decided it was worth an entry of its own on our blog. This past weekend, Kim and I were invited to two dinners serving great food: one on Saturday at our co-worker, Anna Maria's house and another on Sunday at Megan's.

Anna Maria made a lot of classic Italian food: antipasto of prosciutto, mozzarella, brie, and olives, salad, two lasagnas, one eggplant and one with beef and mushroom, roasted zucchini and eggplant, potato casserole, rice and tuna salad on a hard boiled egg half. It was fun to visit Anna Maria's and enjoy dinner with friends.




Megan made deviled eggs, spiced walnuts, pea ravioli in a lemon herb broth, warm potato salad, cauliflower gratin, and stuffed roasted artichokes. Megan's mom helped make dinner and it was nice seeing her again and hearing about things in West Virginia.



However, the highlight of any dinner Megan hosts is the homemade ice cream she makes. Sunday was no exception as she made an ice cream cake with a chocolate wafer cookie crust, pistachio ice cream, and a topping of whipped cream mixed with shortbread crumbs.

Geoff liked the ice cream cake too!

We like dinner parties so much that we are part of a monthly dinner club, VD (veggie dinner) club, as Megan likes to call it, since we stick to a mainly vegetarian menu because we have several vegetarian members. Kim was actually part of two different dinner clubs in Chicago and started one with Megan when she first moved to Philly. After that one fizzled out it was revamped with co-workers from Megan's work and our friends from Lab. We now have six members/couples that take turns cooking once a month on Sunday nights, which is nice since we each only have to cook twice a year. It's always fun to try peoples' culinary experiments and learning techniques we can use in our own everyday cooking.