The Big Feast

This past weekend, my neighbours hosted a potluck dinner tonight with 20 or so of their closest friends. They have hosted them before and it's always a good time. I made my sausage, green bean and rice casserole! To get the recipe, click here.

Before:

After:

Notice my casserole at the bottom left corner? To fit all the guests, my neighbours set up the table in the 2nd floor apartment building hallway and we had a family style dinner with table wine of course. 

There was quite a variety! We dined on some spanikopita, spinach salad, blue cheese with squash and pasta salad, my casserole, onion tarte and some challah!  

Look at that! Casserole almost gone!

Unfortunately, we had two events this evening, so we dined and dashed, promising a different set of friends we'd be by for dessert.

For our second party of the evening, I made some blondies from one of my favourite cookbooks:

It has an awesome selection of old school desserts/ baking such as three different types of brownies, variety of cookies, red velvet cake (my favourite), peach cobbler and chocolate cake with tons of butter, sugar and booze (optional). This book offers recipes that feature all simple ingredients which, in this case, means calories galore, just like Grandma intended. It's not a vegan friendly cookbook (bake book?) at all, but, I love how charming this book is because it's based on the philosophy of all recipes being traditional treats with a southern flare (Mr. and Mrs. Day are from Georgia) and each recipe has a witty story on how they either came up with this recipe or why it's one of their regular customers favourite. Whenever I have a craving for something sweet I turn to this book because it always delivers (unlike this book so far) with its simple-to-follow recipes and so far, I haven't found one recipe that hasn't pleased in the taste/ cravings department.

Nothing but some toasted coconut, mountains of brown sugar, chocolate chips, pecans and bourbon. They were a hit!

Overall, tons of fantastic food this past weekend and I will have more to share in the next post.