Sports Rallyes with Chicago-Style Greek Buffet and Suggested Conversation Topics by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Sports Rallyes with Chicago-style Greek Buffet and Suggested Conversation Topics by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Background:

I began doing tennis championship rallyes in high school featuring fresh-squeezed orange juice for the US Open, strawberries and cream for Wimbledon, and crêpes for the French Open.

Chicago Sports Bar

Tennis championship rallyes morphed into football rallyes after I graduated from the University of Chicago and worked on the first Super Bowl broadcast in the People’s Republic of China.

I think I sold my first sponsorship, because my telephone pitch was, “This would be great PR for the Cubs and trade for the City of Chicago.”

Après-guffaws, I sold a big sponsorship. 

Long-story short – I became a big football promoter.  On the weekends, I went to Bennigan’s Sports Bar and read the Thursday and Friday editions of The Wall Street Journal that I bought at Brentanno’s Chicago store.  I read “The Journal” while I watched the game and gave the paper to the wait staff and cooks when I left.

Monday Night Football Rallyes

On Monday nights, I hosted a “football rallye” for the people who worked with me on the First Super Bowl in China and their spouses or partners.

I worked as an “admin,” so I could get off at 5 pm and deal with deli items for dinner.  I walked to the Treasure Island Supermarket and took a taxi home to Marina City.

I kept receipts that my guests and I (about 8) divvied up.  My guests paid my cab fare for shopping and bringing the deli items up to my apartment.  If they wanted beer, they went to the grocery store in the lobby of Marina Towers where I lived.

While I organized food, my guests and I would talk about:

-current art exhibits

-good magazine or newspaper articles

-movies

-books we were reading

I asked everyone why they thought the book, article, movie, or art exhibit they spent time on was important.

The Buffet was laid out nicely on tables and counters in my pie-shaped apartment.  The living room was devoted to comfy seating for the game.

I did football night in the era of Greek catering.  We ate what we wanted and divvied up items to be taken home.  My friends shared cabs late at night

The Mostly Greek Buffet

-Taramosalata – Greek caviar spread – orange-colored

-Greek Village Salad – a no-lettuce salad made with tomato wedges, feta cheese, Kalamata olives, and mild green peppers

-Tomato – Onion – Oregano Salad

-2 Dressings on the side:

-oil and red vinegar with oregano (rigani)

-tzatziki –cucumber-yogurt sauce

-2 or 3 garlic bread loaves to bake

-2 ready-made Greek bread loaves

-Roast lemon-garlic chicken with dark and white meat separated on a plate

-cheese cubes sprinkled with paprika

-apple slices

-tangerine sections

-pineapple chunks

-banana slices

-vanilla bean yogurt for the fruit

-baked Parmesan cheese sticks

-baked spinach-feta phyllo pastry triangles

-vegetable terrine slices

-smoked salmon open-faced Danish sandwiches

-coffee made from beans by me

Everyone tried a little of everything and leftovers were sorted out for another meal or two.

There are lots of seasons and championships to do a sports rallye night for.

Planning one is great training for ordering catering.

Later in life, I loved learning how to make these items, including spinach-feta phyllo triangle pies.

By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Note: Locally all 3 Demetra locations, Paprika, and Yaffa might be able to provide this meal.

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It's About the Cheese - Part 2 - Lugano Swiss Bistro Reviewed by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

  

It’s About the Cheese – Part 2 – Lugano Swiss Bistro Reviewed by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Raclette’s history evokes Switzerland’s pastoral heritage.  As snow melts in the spring, cow herder’s can take cattle higher up on the mountain slopes until they reach the lushest pastures at the foot of the glaciers.

The herders stay on these high pastures all summer and make rich cheese.  Villagers go up to the pastures where they heat half wheels of the new cheese over branch fires.

The villagers scrape melted cheese over steamed new potatoes, making raclette.

Lugano’s raclette lived up to my foodie musings.  Generous amounts of Swiss cheese covered the potatoes I ordered.  Sour-sweet cornichon pickles added crunchiness and a sour taste to the rich cheese dish I had before me.

My friend took advantage of the weekly savings to order roast rack of lamb with a demi-glaze and seasonal vegetables.  The tender lamb was juicy with a slight crust.  It takes decades of roasting to achieve that finish at home and make it look simple.

My friend’s dish came with Swiss Roesti potatoes as a side dish.  Roesti roughly translates as “potato pancake.”  The Swiss eat them for breakfast along with milky coffee.

To make roesti potatoes, the cook boils waxy potatoes, peels them, and, then, rubs them through a ricer.  Finally, the potatoes are fried in lard with a little bacon until they form a sturdier version of hash browns.

Lugano offers several interesting beers.  We drank Späten Oktoberfest and a Czech lager.  The Oktoberfest is a smooth beer while the Czech beer had more bite to it.

We ate chocolate fondue for dessert.  We dunked musk melon balls, banana slices, and strawberry halves in the chocolate.

I felt like a kid and still do when I eat fondue.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France


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It's the Cheese: Lugano Swiss Bistro Still Shows What Life is All About - Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

It’s the Cheese: Lugano Swiss Bistro Still Shows What Life is All About - Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The editors at the Monterey County (CA) Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) knew they had a treasure house of multicultural restaurants in a community each time I queried for an article with about five restaurant suggestions along with international dishes they served and distinctive herbs and ingredients used in the cuisine.

I loved Carmel’s Swiss Restaurant Lugano for its gemüchlikeit German charm in the German side of the restaurant and dolce vita charm in the Italian side of the restaurant. 

The editors of the Monterey County Weekly asked me to review Lugano and sample more than fondue despite its being excellent.  (They knew my mother’s family was from Wisconsin.)  My article follows:

It’s the Cheese

When my husband Laurent and I yearned for some Old World charm on our recent anniversary, we headed out to Lugano Swiss Bistro in the Barnyard in Carmel, California.

We used to sit on the German side of the restaurant enjoying its carved wood and beer tankard decorations, but now we prefer the Italian side with its painted street scenes of gelati vendors and florists.

The night of our anniversary, we ordered Swiss onion soup and original Swiss fondue.  Swiss onion soup tastes like French onion soup.  They both use beef broth and excellent gruyère cheese in their making.

We continued our cheese fest with fondue, a dish said to have originated in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.  The creamy texture made from bubbling gruyère, emmenthal, and appenzellar cheese makes it tempting to drop bread cubes into Lugano’s fondue and just fish them out with spoons of cheese. 

The penalty for doing something like this according to A Little Swiss Cookbook (ISBN – 0-86281-271-2 published by Appletree Press) by Jacqueline Martinet is to buy another bottle of white wine like Fendant du Valais for your party.

Laurent's favorite wine, though, for fondue at Lugano’s is Père Patriarche.  This slightly sour wine perfectly cuts the rich cheese flavors of the fondue and aids in digestion.

After my dinner with Laurent, I went to dinner with one of my writing group friends, who was looking for restaurants with “locals” menus during slow times during the week.

We went on a Tuesday night and started our meal with a Swiss specialty called Bunderfleisch, air-dried beef.  These are slices of beef that taste like a meaty prosciutto, but not as delicate. 

This was the first time I ate bunderfleisch, and I liked it.  Usually, bunderfleisch is served before fondue or another cheese specialty called raclette, which is cheese that melts out of cheese crust onto plates for spreading.  You eat sweet cornichon pickles with that cheese fest.

End of Part 1.

To be continued.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Hors d'Oeuvres and Appetizers Book Review by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Hors d’Oeuvres and Appetizers Book Review by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Williams-Sonoma along with Gourmet magazine does informative short books for holiday entertaining almost every year.

One of my favorite information-packed cookbooks for planning “cocktail parties” of any kind of “rallye” is 108 pages long and is entitled Hors d’Oeuvres and Appetizers published by the Williams-Sonoma Kitchen Library.

Special features of this cookbook include:

-a 2-page spread on cooking equipment

-4 basic recipes for other recipes in the book: tart pastry, puffball pastry, pizza dough, and yogurt quick bread

-4-page glossary describing Mediterranean ingredients and their usage

-index of 4 basic recipes and 42 cocktail dishes

Each of the 42 recipes has a photo of the completed dish and ingredients separated out from the step-by-step method (without numbers)

The 42 recipes feature American and international dishes such as:

-cheese puffs

-mixed Mediterranean vegetable terrine

-eggplant caviar

-marinated button mushrooms

-gravlax – sweet and salty smoked salmon from Scandinavia

-tandoori chicken from the Punjab

I use this 108-page cookbook as a reference for ordering catering as well as for cooking the items in it myself.

Williams-Sonoma makes many of these books every year, but you can distinguish between books with the same title by looking at the ISBN Number when ordering.

The book has an ISBN of 0-7835-0218-4 for easy ordering.

Happy sampling!!!!

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Seascape Art Books Compiled by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Seascape Art Books Compiled by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

  

The following books and audio books or similar ones often allow visitors to better draw, paint, and appreciate landscapes and seascapes:

1-Landscape Painting: Essential Concepts and Techniques for Plein Air and Studio Practice by Mitchell Albala

2-Painting Beautiful Watercolor Landscapes:  Transform Ordinary Places into Extraordinary Scenes by Joyce Hicks

3-Panting Pastel Landscapes by Jeremy Ford

4-How to Draw Animals:  40 Step-by-Step Drawing Projects by Alisa Calder

5-The Oil Painting Course You’ve Always Wanted:  Guided Lessons for Beginners and Experienced Artists by Kathleen Staiger

6-How to Draw Wildflowers in Simple Steps by Janet Whittle

7-20 Ways to Draw a Tree and 44 Other Nifty Things from Nature:  A Sketch Book for Artists, Designers, and Doodlers by Eloise Renoff

8-A Field Guide to Bird Songs:  Eastern and Central North America (Peterson’s Field Guide, CD and Audiobook) by Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology by Roger Tory Peterson

9-A Field Guide to Bird Songs: Western North America (Peterson’s Field Guides) by Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology by Roger Tory Peterson

10-Painting Skies and Seascapes by Peter Rush

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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