Monday, October 26, 2009

CD Supper Club

1 cut thumb
1 burned finger
1 cracked glass
1 snapped knife
and 5 bottles of wine later, the inaugural meal of CD supper club has been brought off successfully!
CD is for Celia & Diana as well as Casual Dining and Crazy Delicious and any number of other things :)
Our menu was:
Smoked salmon pinwheels (thanks for the recipe mom!)
Chicken stuffed with goat cheese and sundried tomatoes (thanks for the recipe aunty amy!)
Fruited coucous pilaf
Cucumber salad
Roasted eggplants & zucchini
Grilled red & yellow peppers
& Lemon cheesecake for dessert (Celia's mother's recipe)
We had posted an ad on Berlin craigslist and on toytown, a popular English-language forum here, and received 4 responses. 2 couldnät make the date but wanted to get on the mailing list, and two were in! To fill the extra spots, we invited friends like mad, and eventually we had 11 attendees: me and Celia, my two roomies, the two strangers, and 5 friends from various places, known of whom knew each other. It was shaping up to be a good night.
We shopped at the Turkish Market on Friday and at Kaufland on Saturday. Saturday evening, we met to make the cheesecake and cucumber salad, which had to marinate overnight.
On Sunday, we went out to brunch at a popular vegan place near Celia's. Brunch here is a bit different than at home. Most places, 'brunch' consists of a buffet, mostly cold (meats, cheeses, breads, spreads) but sometimes with eggs, etc. for one (usually quite low) price. I was resistant at first (I want me some eggs benedict when I go for brunch) but after Saturday's feast I am a definite convert. Mmm...bread, cheese, and tomato. I could live on that. Plus yogurt, muesli (I am ADDICTED to the stuff now, much prefer it to sugary granola), bean salad, lentil spread and something called 'griespudding' which is like rice pudding but with something much smaller than rice (couscous perhaps?). Afterwards, we went to the HUGE flea market at the Mauerpark cause I'd been wanting to check it out. I have to wonder why anyone shops at real stores here--there are so many awesome markets scattered around the city.
And then it was time to head back to Neukölln and get cookin! We set up my room as the dining room (it really has a lot of space!) with some plates and cutlery borrowed from Celia:

We set out the wine (an essential component):

And the salmon pinwheels:

And then we made the rest of the food, and people started arriving, and it was wonderful!
The strangers turned out to be: Rene, a Danish pilot, and Kate, an economics officer at the US embassy from New Jersey. 3 of our 'friends' didn't show, but everyone ate heartily and we still almost finished the food, not to mention all five bottles of wine. There was lots of laughter, the food was delicious (if I do say so myself), and everyone seemed to have a good time. Afterwards we were happy to find that not only did we break even on costs (phew!) we even made a couple euros each! That means we were essentially paid to cook and eat.
Eric helped out and made a playlist:

Action shot of people beginning to eat:

And everyone posing nicely:

My delicious plate of food (nom nom nom):

The amazing cheesecake!:

And the aftermath. I think we used every dish, cooking pot, and utensil in the kitchen (including the cleaver, which we used to serve the cheesecake, haha):


We had a dishwashing party to some Belle & Sebastian tunes and most of it was done pretty quick.
The past few days, the leftovers have been great: I had couscous and some eggplant smeared with goat cheese filling for lunch yesterday and scrambled eggs with eggplant, green onion, parsley, and cilantro for both dinner last night and breakfast this morning. I'm thinking the leftover cinnamon-cookie crust has got to go to a pie sometime this week.
And that was it! The first supper club. I think we will definitely do it again in future.
Bis bald,
D.

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