summer party, 2003
Yesterday was Tom's 2003 Summer Party. Along with the usual enormous amounts of food came another realization: the ratio of profiteroles per person needs to go WAY up.
Actually, Friday was the sausage making day and we pushed 10 pounds of pork-beef-italian-spiced sausage meat through Tom's sausage "horn" to make some nice, fat (as in plump) links. Those turned out very nicely after about 2 1/2 hours of smoking.
I'm not even going to try and describe everything that we made but will say that the "Five Ways To Sunday Spicy Ribs" were very innovative even if we filled everyone up with the first batch of smoked-rosemary ("Carol's") ribs. Those were delicious too. Someone asked me to describe the Five Ways flavorful beauties and I really couldn't remember the exact details so I said this:
1) The ribs were marinated in something hot.
2) The ribs were then dry-rubbed with...something hot.
3) The ribs were smoked over Tabasco barrel wood which used to contain...something hot
4) The ribs were mopped with...something hot (well, Tapatio hot sauce and water)
5) The ribs were accompanied with a very hot jalapeno sauce which looked one hell of a lot like pesto.
Were they unbearably spicy? Nope. The fifth way definitely put them in the brow-sweat category but you wouldn't believe richness of the overall flavor. Little zings of hotness darted in and out of the smoky, moist meat. Heh, it puts most porn to shame...
So...those profiteroles were gone in about three minutes. It looked like there were about 60-70 of them and one second they were there, the next second completely surrounded by hungry guests and the next second...gone. The rabid guests "found" the backup tray of the delictable treats and restocked the serving plate themselves. There were three sauces for them as well: vanilla, chocolate and carmel. I swear that when they profiteroles were gone that people were drinking little cupfulls of the sauces. Amazing.