You know what I love to eat? Appetizers! Not like the giant appetizer sampler plates with the fried cheese, buffalo wings, fried zucchini, fried mushrooms and a big, ole fried onion blossom. I like little tidbits of this and that. Tapas is (are?) one of my favorite ways to eat. I love Café Seville in the Gaslamp district of San Diego, but I don't get to go there often enough.
Last week, Mr. HeyLucy brought home the food section of the paper, because he liked the looks of some recipes in an article about skillet suppers (from this cookbook, which I now think I might need to get). I made the baked ziti, and it was, indeed, quite tasty. When I saw the recipe for Spanish-style garlic shrimp, I knew I had to try making some tapas this weekend.
My extensive research consisted of googling "tapas", which led me to this site. I decided to try this, this, and this.
It might look like a lot of work, but it wasn't too bad, really. I boiled half a dozen eggs while cleaning up the kitchen after breakfast, and then made the stuffed tomatoes. They were a little labor-intensive, since you have to peel and hollow out the tomatoes, but not difficult. I think I'd like to find a different stuffing recipe, because this was just a very plain egg salad. Not too exciting, but not bad.
Next was the potato salad, and I saved time by using teeny tiny potatoes that I've been buying from Trader Joe's lately. I think they're Yukon Gold potatoes, and they really are tiny, at about an inch in diameter, and they are so delicious. They are almost creamy when you cook them, and don't need any butter at all. For the salad, I just cut them in half to cook. I'm not crazy about anchovies, so I skipped the anchovy-stuffed olives and just used some big green olives. I also forgot that we were out of Dijon mustard, so I used some hot-sweet mustard instead. It was so delicious, I may have to use this as my standard potato salad recipe from now on. Not only delicious, it was so pretty too:
The mushrooms on toast was just about the easiest thing ever, and I just used store-bought mayonaise. I'd love to try it with homemade aioli sometime. Either way, I think you should make some this week. I already feel a craving coming on.
I'm having some leftover potato salad for lunch.
