When I committed to writing daily and then blogging, it never occurred to me that this might entail writing in the middle of the night after hosting a dinner party and then cleaning up. Some people just go to bed and clean up in the morning. Yuck!!! Who wants to wake up to a big mess with bits of food solidified to plates and remnants of red wine looking like dried blood in the bottom of wine glasses. No me. So here I am fulfilling my commitment to write daily.
Usually, I invite a lot of people over and work like crazy or give up and do potluck. This time I decided on something simple for six friends (three couples). One friend is a vegetarian so everyone ate vegetarian. The menu included homemade refried black bean casserole–the favorite of two of these friends. The recipe for this dish is on a previous blog post. In honor of my former exchange student son, Gaston Luis Zulaica del Sueldo, I made one of my best salads ever. When he lived with me, he made salad almost every night, spectacular, colorful salads. I made a mixture of Jasmine and several other kinds of rice and the following casserole which has no name so guess I will need to invent one.
Vegetarian Casserole with Soyrizo
Pour enough olive oil into the bottom of a heavy casserole dish to cover it. Thinly slice purple potatoes (I think they are called blue, but they look purple to me), and cover the bottom with a layer of these. Cover the potatoes with a layer of chopped onions, then a layer of coarsely chopped poblano peppers–I added a few halved and seeded jalapeños. The next layer is soyrizo crumbled to completely cover the previous layers. If you are not vegetarian, use chorizo. Repeat the previous layers. Combine 3 T of flour and 1 cup milk. Pour over the top of the casserole. Bake until the potatoes are done. You can make all this several hours in advance and pour the milk mixture over it just before it goes in the oven. I actually used the grill outside on low to bake it this time–warm day and did not want to heat up the house. We finished off dinner with chocolate chip mint ice cream with Chambord poured over the top. We also enjoyed a while dessert wine called Electra.
Salad a la Gaston
Good friends.
Pretty ladies
writingontherim 
Juliana – I can relate to the writing late at night to keep up your writing commitments! I’m doing it more than I would like. Well done.
The salad looks lovely. Beautiful colours. You are very good blogging everyday. I set a goal of once a week and even then I sometimes miss out. I finish university at the end of May, hopefully I’ll have more time then.
I made a commitment to write everyday at a writing conference recently and it seemed like the best way to do that was to blog everyday.