All posts tagged: platter

Anatomy of a platter with Lisa’s Hummus (and a giveaway)

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  Summer is at our doorstep At our place, sunny days often lead to long evenings in the backyard. Grazing platters are great for easy weeknight dinners. Bring out your speakers, throw a forgiving tablecloth over your weathered outdoor table and delight in the warm weather. I keep a few platter-friendly bits and pieces on hand in case of unexpected guests or for days when I don’t feel like cooking. Put together a simple platter for two with just a few items foraged from your fridge or pump it with more items when catering for many mouths. Platters are super easy to scale up or down and if there’s more than 5 people at the table, it’s a good idea to make a couple of smaller platters so everyone can have easy access. Lisa’s make entertaining easy with their range of delicious hummus and dips. When it comes to platters, colour is important and I’ve picked my favourite beautifully colourful dips from the Lisa’s Hummus range: Chargrilled Capsicum, Basil Pesto, and Beetroot with Roasted Cashews. …

Balsamic garlic mushrooms

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We are obsessed with mushrooms at our house. I disliked mushrooms as a child but now I don’t go more than a couple of days without eating mushrooms. I love that mushrooms are great for breakfast, lunch or dinner and you can bet that I have eaten them at all times of day. In fact, I have distinctly awesome memories of eating mushrooms from The Burgerie on K Rd late, late at night (or is that early hours of the morning) after a night out. If you haven’t had those mushrooms before, they are dangerous morsels of delicious molten lava. You have been warned. Four mushrooms or a handful is considered a good daily dose to reap all the benefits mushrooms offer. Mushrooms can be eaten raw or cooked, raw is healthier, cooked is tastier (in my opinion). It doesn’t take much time to prep mushrooms and even The Koala can rustle up some tasty mushrooms. Thanks to Meadow Mushrooms I have a mushroom prize pack worth $25 to giveaway to one Auckland mushroom lover. …

Pinot Noir and a Platter

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I’m super lucky to have Sabato just around the corner from work. Sabato is a gourmet food store and it’s a happy place where I can pretend to be a foodie during my lunch break. Here I can pick up olives stuffed with all kinds of wonderful things, small pottles of very good pâté and breads with heart. I can sample a whole lot of new things that I’ve never tasted before. Sabato make delicious gourmet sandwiches to order. The sandwhich I had was huge, wrapped in pretty paper and filled with yummy Sabato goodies. Platters are great. Each bite a tasty something else. Interactive and social. Platters are made for sharing. Manzanilla olives stuffed with chorizo, potato sourdough, chicken and brandy pâté, Ferndale gruyere, Whitestone priobiotic brie, and of course, roasted garlic*. All washed down with a celebratory glass of pinot noir. When we ate this platter for dinner, I pretty much ate a can of olives by myself. Red wine and olives. That’s real health food. But if tomorrow, scientists decide that neither red wine or …

Sexy French Sausages. Take 2

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I squeezed another meal out of those sexy French snags. More assembling than actual cooking. A huge plate, but the kind of dinner that makes you feel good afterwards. I presented this plate to my husband who for some reason thought it was a shared platter for dinner. He realised his mistake when I brought out a second plate of food for me. One each FTW! Cheese, beans, avocado, cucumber, eggs, spring onion, lemon pepper, cherry tomatoes, rocket and sexy French sausages.