Merk's birthday dinner...the follow up.

As I am sure you saw from the pictures that I posted later last night, that the recipes that I made came out beautifully, unfortunately, they were not as delicious as they had looked. Basically, the recipe was spot on with how I made it, however, we are just not familiar enough with those spices, and the eggplant was overwhelmingly spicy.

THE EGGPLANT: With the eggplant recipe from Bon Appetite you were to take the olive oil and mix in 7 spices, which included cinnamon, cumin, paprika, red pepper flakes, coriander, fresh ground pepper and some garlic. Not completely unfortunate, however, the spices collectively were just too overbearing for our taste buds and only 1 of the 4 of us actually finished the eggplant. I believe I had a total of 3, maybe 4 bites.

THE BULGUR SALAD: We all agreed, at least I think we agreed, that this was really very good. Made from bulgur, currants (bless the staff at Heinens who searched high and low for those currants for me), lemon juice, cilantro and some parsley, I believe (double checking on that shortly). The salad was light and refreshing. We all agreed that it makes a better side dish for a summer outing, as opposed to early January, but we all enjoyed it.

THE HERB/CHARD/FETA SOUP: This soup has pucker power! As I said before, somewhere, you can only eat a small amount of this soup, and it has to be piping hot! The flavors worked well, however, we thought the lemon juice and feta were a bit overpowering and made you literally have a sour face, in a good way. I enjoyed it and we had a good laugh starting out our dinner with the colorful soup.

THE PORK AND DESSERT: Okay, I did not make the pork, however, Mark loves pork so his bestie Shaun made that and Amanda made our dessert. The pork was by far the hit of the evening. Extremely flavorful and I would share his secret, but, its not my secret to share. The dessert was homemade angel good cake with a raspberry puree. The kids absolutely could not get enough of this, thanks Amanda!

The so called "last meal" before our morning meeting for the detox!

Namaste!

Amy