It was a lovely afternoon. Four friends came over, two kids were very cooperative and stayed in their room and took care of themselves for a couple of hours, and J, my PC consultant, treated us to Satay Chicken Pasta Salad.
The pasta salad was so yummy.
We adapted the recipe to make it GF (it was already CF). I prepped a 16 oz bag of Tinkyada spirals taking care to cook it optimally. (Boil plenty of well salted water, put pasta in at full boil and boil for 1-2 minutes, cover and turn heat off and let sit for 20 minutes, drain and rinse thoroughly with cold water to stop the cooking process, then drain pasta thoroughly.)
Instead of bottled Asian dressing, J made her own using Bragg's, rice vinegar, vegetable oil, powdered ginger, and sugar. She eschewed the seasoning mix and used the fresh ingredients mentioned at the bottom of the linked blog post.
The finished dish was unrecognizable as being special needs. It absolutely looked and tasted like "pasta salad". Everyone agreed on this and J was excited to now have a GF dish in her PC repertoire. I wish I had taken a picture! It looked fab in the PC bamboo serving dish. But, I was too excited about digging in and once I tasted it, I was very focused on eating :-)
I also served deviled eggs, braised cabbage with onion, and the delectable chocolates. Also, cold jasmine pearl tea with agave, as well as, hot tea.
It was so relaxing watching the first snow of the season come down outside while chatting with friends and enjoying good food together. J was a wonderful "face" of the company. Warm, funny and down-to-earth.
3 comments:
Oh, SO yummy! Thanks for putting this on:)
Yummy.
But I have to say I always feel sort of weird at these parties. I feel pressure to buy and I don't always find something I want and then I'll buy something cheap just so I don't feel guilty. Then the party aspect is lost on me because guilt + party does not equal fun.
Not to say that Pampered Chef isn't a good company with good products. It's mostly just because I'm cheap and I like to look for bargains.
But I hope it all went well and don't you get a discount as hostess?
I don't believe in feeling guilty in situations like that, I live outside of that box as much as possible :-)
You get $15 towards "product" for hosting. For me, enough for a nice garlic press which was demo-ed at the party.
It was nice to do something different. Not everyone who came bought something and I made it explicit in my invites that you should not feel like you had to buy.
But, yeah, if the internal tendency towards guilt was going to be too much, I'd avoid parties like that, too :-)
I used to feel guilty about chain letters. Like I *had* to continue the chain so as not to disappoint the person who sent it to me. Once I made the decision to ignore any and all of them, I felt much better :-)
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