more dot-luck

Here is more of the spread from this last dot-luck (the feeding frenzy). Have I explained the dot-luck? I live in Dorchester, nicknamed "The Dot" or even "Dirty Dot." So Sunday night pot lucks in The Dot = Dot-luck! Which is the same thing as dot-pot.

Anyhow, the food was awesome. As always, I encourage the people who made these dishes to leave comments with more details.

Jesse, Rachel, and Liz - awesome sangria and a spinach salad with avacado and grapefruit

Connie constructed a delightful and festivley-garnished fruit salad

Jess made a vegetable medly of sauteed mushrooms, peas, and corn (insert: "Corn!! I didn;t eat any corn!!")

Sarah brought a rice dish with nuts, cranberries, and mint.

Edible all around!

feeding frenzy: chicken

This week's dot-luck was a total feeding frenzy! And it was really fun. I made chicken, other people made other stuff (more posts to come).

As many of you know, I love roasting chickens. usually I just stuff the cavity with carrots, celery and onion, and rub the skin with s&p, but here I stuffed the cavity full of chives, thyme, pepper, salt, and one whole lemon cut in chunks. Then I rubbed the skin with crushed peppercorns, chopped lemon zest, and salt. It was really moist and tasty, but the lemon was much more subtle than I had envisioned.

Guest Chef Chris! Scallion Pancakes, part 1 of 3

Chris brought over scallion pancake fixin's to the most recent dot-luck. I am hoping he will add some comments to clarify the process and maybe even a link! He brought over the ball of dough, so that part is a mystery. When he arrived he chopped up some scallions to have at the ready.

Chris rolled out the whole ball with some flour, like a pie crust.

He drizzled on some sesame oil, and spread it over the surface. Then he sprinkled this with the chopped scallions.

Chris's scallion pancakes, part 2 of 3

After rolling up the big pancake with the oil and scallions, he cut this tube into 4 even pieces.

Then he twisted each piece into a long twisty shape, and rolled this back up into a ball. Kind of hard to explain, I should have taken even more pictures. The resulting ball was rolled into a smaller pancake. All this twisting adds air pockets and the layer texture. Right, Chris?

Here are the final four, ready for frying.

Scallion pancakes, part 3 of 3

Chris pan-fried each pancake in a little bit of vegetable oil

... and cut them into wedges


Final product served with a soy-rice vinegar dipping sauce. Edible!

Soba noodle salad

I made soba noodles last friday and they turned out sub-par. So I did some google-ing and found this recipe. I took the suggestions from a few of the comments and added two chopped cucumbers and substituted sesame oil, and made it for the dot-luck. It was really good! And so easy. The mint really makes this dish. I have lots of great scallion pancake pictures to share for the next post. Stay tuned.

Treats!

Sarah and Jim brought rice krispie treats to the Dot-Luck this Sunday. With chocolate chips! Remeber how Sarah made those amazing fries? I do, I think about them a lot.

Sunday Dot-Luck!

Sunday night Potluck in Dorchester! It's a new thing, so far so good. As I learned last week, what Sunday night really needs is a great dinner with friends, so here we have it. We have several guest chef entries from dinner tonight (guest chefs are encouraged to post comments with the specifics of their dish!) :


Julia and Dave made a spicy crab dip in a bread bowl. It was really tasty, and we snacked on this while cooking in the kitchen.



Jesse brought a delicious spring lentil salad, with mint and feta cheese. It was awesome and pretty. She grew the mint herself!


Ben brought a salad with all kind of exciting veggies tossed in, like snowpeas. But the best part was the dressing - with curry powder!


I made savory pancakes with cornmeal, salamai, fresh scallions, corn and red peppers (see below). I forgot to take a picture of the final product, but you can see them in the salad picture, in the upper left. Jess beat the egg whites (see above), and I folded these in to give the pancakes some structure and keep them fluffy. The cornmeal was coarse ground, so I soaked it in the milk while I prepped everything else.

The recipe is the JOC basic pancake recipe, with a few changes: no sugar, more salt and some pepper, sub cornmeal for half the flour, and adding in the chopped stuff listed above.


I love the Dot-Pot!