Fried Balls: Ambra Visits

The following recipe comes from Susie's Kitchen's very first guest blogger. Thank you Ambra! These little balls are bite-sized, utterly delicious, and give a chef plenty of reasons to say balls! Dice the eggplants and fry them with oil and garlic.(skin and all) Leave the fried eggplants to cool and add salt. If the eggplants are still watery, add grated bread (Italian bread crumbs or any typical substitute) to dry out the dough. Otherwise, wet the bread, then squeeze it in order to take away the water in excess. Add parsley, grated Parmesan, black pepper and eggs (1 or 2 - as much as you need to mix all the ingredients). Make the balls. Flour the balls. Fry the balls. (the balls are about the size of whopper malted milk balls) Ambra was a visiting student in the Economics department at UMKC last semester. She stayed with Russell and I for 3 months. Ambra is from a small coastal city between Rome and Naples in Italy. Ambra and I both love to cook and so we spent many hours discussing food, nutrition, and recipes. (Which Ambra sometimes got mixed up with the word receipts. Since both words are utterly ridiculous... who can blame her?) The moral to this story is... Balls. Balls are fun and balls are tasty. Especially when fried:) Also... These are quite good served with my favorite bean ball (falafel) on a pita with tahini or tadziki sauce. These are rather excellent for finger food at parties.

Improv In Action: Thai Curry Chicken Phyllo Pastry

This will have an air of brevity. The party is tomorrow night!

I was thinking of doing chicken kabobs, but don't really have enough chicken for that. I am stuffing all kinds of stuff into a phyllo pastry because that is what I have and the dinner is mediterranean themed (mostly because I can feel lots of people fairly easily with greek/arab food) and Ambra (it's her party) Is from Italy. So...I'm going to do the obvious thing. I'm going to stuff the pastries with a thai curried chicken. Sort of. I had this vision of ginger and coriander and turmeric and lemon and onions and garlic and such. Then I realized that I made and froze a bunch of thai curry paste recently and it had all those things (and more).

How the Thai Curry goes with the theme... There are many varieties of thai curry around. My first and only love is I now know a very specific Thai Yellow Curry called Mussaman/Massaman Curry . (Many Thai Places Serve a more Asian version of yellow Curry) The menu almost always says Yellow Curry with a description but rarely distinguishes the name Mussiman. Anyhow, the Mussaman Curry is so named because this curry is made by the Muslims of Thailand and it incorporates Arab Spices. (Cardimom, Corriander, Clove, Cumin)

The curry is usually served as a soup kind of dish with potatoes and other vegetables. I'm going to cook the chicken from frozen in my crockpot with Onions, Curry Paste, Tamarind, Lime Juice and a little bit of coconut milk. I'll cook it down into a marinade kind of coating, then I will process it in the food processor. The mixture will include some sauteed onions, tiny roasted potato dices, pre-cooked peas, and fresh shredded carrots.

I'll try and let you know how it turns out after the party.