You Feta Not Shout, You Feta Not Cry

chip and dip

(See that beautiful white bowl in the back – it’s courtesy of 80P’s mom.
The thank you note is in the mail!)

Fine. I’m a total fucking homemaker.

Last minute, 80P and I had friends over for the Bengals game before we headed to El and h diddy’s holiday/birthday party. Godforbid I don’t have an appetizer greeting them on their arrival. I assess the contents of the fridge and decide a dip is totally workable. I also have wholewheat pita that I can turn into pita chips. Perfect. I’m turning into Martha Stewart. Well, except for the fact that since I used all of my prep time to cook, I answered the door in my sweats and a t-shirt. And then insulted the beer they brought over. Well, maybe I’m not Martha quite yet.

Post jump: More beautiful pics from 80P and, of course, recipes

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Did a Pig Just Fly by My Window???

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Or did 80 Proof cook an entire meal and is now writing a post about it?

It’s true folks, just this past Monday night, I spent over an hour in the kitchen, dicing, searing, and serving a meal for two. I will fully admit that I did not make this recipe up, in fact I downloaded it from epicurious. (BTW, you might notice a new tag called, follow the leader, which in the future will detail our attempts at cooking other people’s recipes.)

We love eating fish, but our local stores, Giant included, have just a woeful selection. If you are in the mood for sea creatures your choices revolve around 8 kinds of shrimp or crabs, salmon, or tilapia. Freaking tilapia. It tastes fine and is easy to season and cook, but 12 times in row gets a little stagnant. Since Gansie was already planning on shopping at Whole Paycheck, she picked up some catfish. Truth be told, it ain’t that different from tilapia, but enough to make us happy.

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Hallofoodie

Although slutty costumes are currently on the rise for the tween trick-or-treaters, us mature Hween celebrants have chosen to showcase our love for ghosts and pumpkins through food inspired get-ups.

Highlights:

salt girl 1 saltgrrrl

Morgasm, SAG‘s girlfriend, selected a totally kosher take on dressing up – the Morton’s Salt girl. (Please excuse SAG’s Elton John get-up)

***

hdiddybird 1 hdiddybird 2

hdiddybird 3

h diddy found her natural calling – as a pizza eating cock.

***

(more photos ahead!)

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Moussaka or Something Like It

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I’ve been wanting to make moussaka since way back at Greekfest, but have been avoiding it due to the unending sauna-like weather of the past few months.

Now, I’m not tryin to say I eat only light and airy foods all summer (see: fetuccini alfredo at the beach), but it just hasn’t seemed right to make this very meat-y, very chees-ey warming dish in this kind of heat.

Still, I absolutely love the idea of layering meat with eggplant – it’s just not fair that vegetarians get to have all the eggplant-fun – us meatlovers should be able to get in on the act too.

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Puff, Puff, Pies

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Every once in a while – not too often of course – I stop blogging about food for long enough to go cook something. Spinach pie (spanakopita) is one of the first semi-gourmet things I figured out how to make. It’ s one of those dishes that is fairly easy to do but somehow still really impresses people.

Unfortunately, I seem to have run into some bad kitchen karma lately, possibly due to my making fun of gansie and Howie. While shopping for ingredients, I made a major mistake and bought plain old puff pastry dough instead of perfect phyllo. So I had my spinach filling all mixed and ready to go, and opened up my phyllo to discover that instead of 100 sheets of beautiful flaky goodness, I had four doughy layers of puff that would be much better for making some kind of weird English meat pie than the delicate spanakopita.

I grabbed a rolling pin and did some emergency work, flattening them out to more sheet-like layers and then just went ahead and made it anyway. Fortunately, this was one of those “how bad can it be” situations, since it was still a mixture of dough, butter, spinach and cheese.

Recipe, assuming you buy the correct ingredients, after the jump.

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Feta Rosemary Dip

Another party pleaser!

This is one that Whole Foods sells, but my version is heavier on the cheese and lighter on the oil. Buy a block of Feta (the cheaper kinds will do) and crumble it. Then pour in a lot of olive oil—Whole Foods lets the feta swim in the oil, but I prefer to let the cheese dominate. Chop up two or three cloves of garlic and mix in. Then add rosemary (be generous). This is a delicious spread for baguette or hearty breads. Everyone loves it!

so good you can eat it with a spoon

You can accompany a spread like this with a bowl of green olives, finely diced, garlic, also finely diced, swimming in olive oil and with a bit of added salt. Also very tasty with bread and a great and easy party snack.

Top Photo: Cheese Supply

My Big Fat Greek Weekend

Greek flag

It’ s that time of year again – Greekfest!!….what,  you didn’t know? I had a pretty freakin amazing time at Greekfest 2006 DC so this year I trekked down to the surprisingly large Greek cultural epicenter in Norfolk, VA. on a press junket for food bloggers to visit my bro, his wife and the new baby…Pretty impressive show those ConfedeGreeks put on – I completely stuffed myself with moussakka, souvlaki and rice pilaf. But come Monday, we just weren’ t ready for Greekfest to end so the sister-in-law and I decided to try our hand at baklava. Now, phyllo dough is one of my fav ingredients, but I haven’t done many desserts, so we checked a variety of recipies online, before realizing there was one on the phyllo dough box. We went with that, because, really, the phyllo dough box probably knows what it’s talking about when it comes to baklava.

Not too complex – basically the same thing as anything else with phyllo…layer the sheets and make sure each one has enough butter to drown a horse. Alternate layers of filling (chopped walnuts, sugar, cinnamon and cloves). Bake it for 45, then top with Syrup, which we made by simmering boiling water, honey, sugar and lemon zest.

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