Birthday Pizza at Bollini’s is the Best!
Omg Erin, you’re so funny. I didn’t see these expressions til I came home.
So I’m using this as my personal blog here, but I wanted to post the pics from the pizza place I love! Bollini’s Neapolitan Wood-fired pizza randomly situated in Monterey Park, not otherwise known for their wood-fired real Italian style pizza. The very thinnest crust, with a burnt edge, I love it. Totally reminds me of how pizza was in Italy all the time. Mangia, mangia.
Barry showed up after these pics. Good birthday pizza, thanks everyone! Oh and the corkage is free! Afterwards we went shoe-perusing at DSW where I made Jancy try on all sorts of trashy shoes 
DFT is Back From the Dead! And Bryan Cooks Dinner!
It looked just like this, I swear
So I felt like I better contribute something, and it was also my birthday coming up, so I finally cooked dinner! Sorry to be a moocher all this time guys!! I will have to come up with more recipies. :{ Well even for this it’s more like I picked the recipies and brought the ingredients and then Erin and everyone else helped cook them. Haha. Yay!
Jeudi dîner de soir { Thursday Night Dinner }(if the internet’s French is correct) consisted of my favorite, easiest oven dish ever!
“Poulet Provencal” — Chicken, herbes de provence, olive oil, lotsa sliced and minced garlic, kalamata olives, tomatoes, potatoes, throw it in the oven and it cooks itself. Juicy and fills the whole house with the mm mm goodness. Yummy to sop up the juices with a crusty bread. Erin made the dish even better by having Chef Barry brown the chicken pieces first in a frying pan to get them nice and crispy. Then she deglazed the pan with white wine to make even more yummy sauce. In all the pre-frying excitement I forgot that I was supposed to rub the chickens with the herbes mixture but we smooshed it all on and threw em in the oven pans chock full of tomatoes and onions and it came out great. I’m making myself hungry…
Side dish: Sauteed kale with cannellini beans, & garlic. I think we substituted red wine vinegar. People seemed to like it, it went fast!
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Sauteed-Greens-with-Cannellini-Beans-and-Garlic-241906
I have to figure out how to post my phone pix and will add later. It was mm good.
So, in honor of all this, and me trying to return to DFTs more regularly, I’ve resurrected the blog! Hey, only 9 months since the last post! Welcome back everyone!
Sent: Tuesday, September 8, 2009 8:17:58 PM
Subject: Re: Jeudi dîner de soir? { Thursday Night Dinner }
Yum! And Bryan is cooking? I can’t miss this !
See you there
Jancy
Montes Alpha 2006 Syrah
Bought it at costco because of it’s 91 point rating in wine spectator.
Nice and mellow. Davey days black pepper. I sense some nice fruits. Think blackberry jam on leather.
Drank with 40 clove garlic chicken. The chicken needed salt.
Costco Hotdogs,Express!
Costco polish sausages are the most awesome things evar, only made more awesome by the knowledge that you can order at the register and pick up on your way out. Is this only a San Francisco thing, or can I do this in LA too?
SF costco seems so much more fancy on the whole. A whole aisle of cured meats? Another just for cheeses? Amazing!
a very deep fried xmas
everybody get down to business!
a very busy deep fried tuesday occurred this week. to start, davey had started baking oatmeal cookies before anyone had arrived:
oatmeal cookies, yum!
then erin arrived with the ingredients for her spaghetti and meatballs extravaganza. the ingredients were so copious, they required two trips to the car:
not pictured, all the stuff on the floor, the ice chest (!) and the two bottles of chianti
and then, pandamonium. erin starts the sauce, davey starts the meatballs. jen starts the noodles. jeannette is chopping carrots. bryan and jancy work on tiramisu. i just kinda stand around. of course, there was wine. lots and lots of wine:
glugluglug.
more? but of course!
the results were delicious, and we emerged stuffed to the gills. i learned tonight that the secret to some absolutely yums tomato sauce is to not be afraid of dumping a ton of salt and sugar in. also, jancy and i revived our 95% avocado guacamole argument. then we did our first evar useful-white-elephant gift exchange. (in lieu of homemade holiday gifts, which have not had the highest success rates, at least for me.) after a rousing strategic sequence of gift stealing, i ended up with davey’s gift, the sprinkles cupcake mix. until we meet again, anthropologie ceramic citrus juicer.
oh yeah, here’s the food:
brocolli with a little grated fontina. boil with salty water, it makes a difference!
garlic bread. mush the minced garlic into salt and olive oil with the side of your knife to make a nice muddled paste. mix with butter, spread on bread.
turkey meatballs, seared in a pan and then finished on parchment paper in the oven. jancy and davey ate bits of raw turkey like it was no biggie. if it were me i would have been on my way to poison control.
spaghetti with turkey meatballs. i got to use erin's immersion blender to blend the sauce together. again, salty water for boiling to pasta turned out to be key.
after all this, i was too roly-poly to take any more pictures. the tiramisu was delicious, as were the cookies. we busted out the nog from broguiere’s dairy, which is apparently the best nog in all the world and thus hard to find in much abundance, especially on christmas eve eve. i’m not a nog afficionado, so i can’t vouch for its status on the world nog stage, but it was pretty yummy. kinda reminded me of wrigley’s juicy fruit gum, in a way.
oh, also, jen’s birthday is coming up! we did a preemptive celebration:
(i was going to put a picture up here, but all parties involved looked pretty ridic, and not in a good way.)
thankfully, everyone took some leftovers so me and davey weren’t left with a load of food to tempt us late late at night when we have no business eating handfuls of plain spaghetti out of a strainer.
anyways, merry xmas everyone. i don’t think we’ve ever had an official xmas dinner before, so this was a nice new treat for this year. here’s to future planning of holiday dinners and no more failed craft projects for homemade holidays!
Budae Jigae (Korean Army Stew)
Davey made some amazing Korean Army Soup. He’s now officially Korean in my eyes. Inspired by a visit to Chunju Han-il Kwan, he made his own and it was better than any I’ve had before at a restaurant. The spiciness was korean medium high spicy but just right for most of us!
Pulled Pork Sandwich & Cole Slaw
Pork is one of our favorite things in the whole world. I know on my death bed, I would like to be fed pork through a straw… MMMM PORK, the perfect meat.
Erin made the pulled pork the day before. Today we preped the cole slaw and did some deep frying – potato chips! It was all pork-a-licious.
Bread Day
Not quite Tuesday nor quite Dinner but it was a similar gathering of sorts and lots of food! It was the first day of my freelance career – May 3rd!
Bi Bim Bop!
This was back in March on the 4th. Yep, we are that behind! Chef was Jeanette. Dessert was leftovers from Barry and Davey’s Brunch Festivities. I believe they were Eclairs!
