“Delicious Gatherings: Recipes to Celebrate Together” is the second release from Tara Teaspoon (aka Tara Bench). While the first book was more about global flavors in everyday cooking, the new book mostly focused on cooking for a small crowd/dinner party.
The book is divided into:
- Gather-around dinners (with sub-sections: mezze dinner, holiday dinner, fiesta Mexicana, Sunday supper, grill party)
- Serious sides
- Main events
- Breakfast and brunch
- Baking and sweets
The sub-sections are full menus on a theme which is great if you can’t decide what dishes to pair. I only wish they include a suggested timeline of events for people who don’t host regularly (like me!) and need a little more guidance.
Some recipes that I would like to try are:
- Smoked gouda and scallion mashed potatoes
- Miso honey Brussels sprouts
- Dill bread
- Grilled veggie kebabs with walnut drizzle
- Spinach and artichoke tarte soleil
- Easy French bread
- Skirt steak with strawberry chimichurri and rice pilaf
- Chicken banh mi burgers
- Texas-style beef brisket at home
- Half-and-half granola pancakes with ginger maple cream syrup
- Family breakfast turnover
- Apple pudding cake with butter sauce
- Fresh peach pie with sweet cream cheese
- Great grains chocolate chip cookies
I couldn’t get past a craving for cookies when this book showed up, so I started off with the chocolate peanut butter puddle cookies. The DIY puddle chips were what really caught my attention, which are simply made from white chocolate and peanut butter melted together.
Once cooled and firmed up, cut to shape and you’ve got puddle chips. The cookies themselves are made from flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, salt, butter, sugar, brown sugar, egg, vanilla extract, chocolate chips, and the DIY puddle chips. The recipe makes 10 large cookies (for better or for worse, I made 9). They are decadent and delicious!
The second recipe I wanted to make was the red pepper and burrata burgers. I didn’t want to buy hamburger buns so the second recipe I actually made was the silky-soft dinner rolls, which I resized as buns. The dinner rolls utilize the tangzhong method, which is to cook a small portion of the flour in some of the water to a gelatinized paste (the gelatinization helps to keep breads soft and moist as it holds water better). Here, the paste is then mixed with the rest of the flour, the rest of the liquid, salt, yeast, milk powder, eggs, and butter. Then knead, proof, shape, final rise, and bake. The resulting bread was lovely. It was just barely sweet from the milk and milk powder. Even though there’s butter, it’s not heavy or too decadent. It’s just the right amount of butter. (I halved the recipe and made 4 burger buns, but they were too big. I should have made 5 buns.)
Going back to the burger, you start by making a garlic mayo. This is the burger condiment. For the burger patties, you mix ground beef with some Italian sausage, chopped roasted red peppers, and grated Parmesan. When the patties are cooked up, you assemble your burgers with arugula, tomatoes, and burrata (or fresh mozzarella which was my choice). The dinner rolls worked pretty well as burger buns. The burgers themselves were really good. The patties were juicy and well seasoned, and the garlic mayo was a great condiment. My only criticism was that the bits of roasted peppers kept falling out as I was cooking the patties. An annoyance more than anything else, but it has me thinking about other ways to make the mixture.
It’s a solid cookbook, especially if you plan to host. The Main Events recipes generally feeds 4-6, while the rest of the book serves anywhere from 6-10. If you’re not looking to feed that many people, this book might not be for you. Or at least be prepared to do some math and scaled down.
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Disclaimer – I kindly received a review copy of this book from Shadow Mountain for this review. I’m not getting paid for this post. The views and opinions expressed are purely my own.
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