New Year's Eve Experiments

Suzanne remarked that one does not generally use guests as guinea pigs when testing a new recipe.  I'm not sure whether it is fearlessness, foolishness, insensitivity, or malevolence, but I had no problem trying out 4 new recipes on Shawn and Suzanne on New Year's Eve.

The risk was reduced because we went with all appetizer recipes, and two of the four recipes came from my foodie friend Jim.  We started with a recipe from Jim which I later to be popular on the web, and a quickie, grape jelly-chili meatballs.  You whip together 2 12 ounce bottles chili sauce with a 32 ounce jar grape jelly, and dump it in the crockpot over 2 bags meatballs, frozen.  We split between two pots, one for veggie meatballs for Allie.

Next up two new recipes we found. Tiny Tomato Tarts use a pie crust filled with tomato-basil mixture and finished with a three cheese and mayo topping, baked in the oven.

Next Grapefruit-Squash-Goat Cheese flatbreads, adapted from here.  We tweaked by swapping the butternut squash for roasted beets.  This recipe was just OK, there wasn't enough sweet and salt to balance the acid in the grapefruit.  But not bad.

We finished with another favorite of Jim, Russian Cream Parfaits.  2 cups sour cream, 3/4 cup sugar, and a little vanilla whipped together and layered with fresh fruit.  I used blackberries and raspberries and topped with some grapefruit zest.

Delicious.  Happy New Year and Go Blue!