Foodblogger potluck

A few weekends ago, I hosted a small potluck with several friends, all of whom happen to be foodbloggers. I thought it would be cool to use these plates and utensils I've always seen sold at Costco during the holidays. There was a coupon in our Costco mailer so Bert picked up one set of each...

The dinner and salad plates come in a box of 50 (25 of each size). It faked out several guests who were expecting a "real" china plate and were surprised by how "light" it was because it was really plastic!

Below are the fake silver cutlery, also plastic.

I don't think I'd use this for every gathering or dinner part but it was fun to give it a try...

Well, enough about this nonsense. On with the food!

Here's a quick roundup of the dishes served:

Ulang sa Gata (Prawns in coconut milk):

Binagoongan baboy (Pork with shrimp paste):

The "stand in" photo for TC's Adobong Manog (chicken adobo) using an older photo from a previous post . See the Ulang sa Gata and Adobong Manok recipes here.

Update - I totally forgot about this (since I didn't take any photos of it) and curiously enough, although I've made this soup many times in the past, I guess I've never blogged it., Smoky Corn Chowder. So here is the recipe from Real Simple. The smokiness comes from Spanish smoked paprika. I love the sparing use of bacon fat to saute the garlic and onons. I also added diced potatoes to the soup to give it more heft. My soup was garnished with sliced scallions and crumbled bacon.

Awesome bowtie pasta salad brought in by Mary (who came with Jake and his kids). I loved the spinach, bacon, and yellow tomatoes in here. I liked it so much, I had it for breakfast the next day!

Bulgogi sliders from Kirbie and her DH from Kirbie's Cravings. These were so cute and tasty - bulgogi with a spicy mayo spread sandwiched between Hawaiian egg bread.

An overview of the dessert table:

I only made one actual dessert, but the next few were bought at Seafood City. These were Suman (steamed sweet rice wrapped in banana leaf) from Valerio's.  They were supposed to be Ube Pandan flavor, but tasted more like ube. When unwrapped, the rice was a dark purple hue. These are meant to be eaten with the freshly grated coconut.

These were Pastillas (Philippine milk candy) - Ube and regular milk flavor. The pieces were actually one long piece, but I had TC cut them in half. Sometimes this candy is wrapped up in colored cellophane. If it's fresh, the texture is a bit soft. At Filipino Desserts Plus at the Seafood City food court, they were unwrapped in a plastic container and were of a harder consistency, as in difficult to stick in a toothpick.

These "ball" candies were a hit with the kids, the Coco Mango and Guava flavored (bought at Seafood City). I liked the coco mango candies better.

From Darlene of My Burning Kitchen, her amazing tiramisu! Check out her recipe here. The rather ceremonial slicing was done by her husband, Paul. In the small green container was a delicious pumpkin cream cheese dip that was the accompaniment to these spice cookies (seen in the dessert table overview photo), made by Mary. Check out here recipe here!

Kirbie's delicious Nutella swirl bread (see here recipe here):

Ube macapuno turnovers

Lots of good food and desserts were enjoyed by all. Everything was great and itt was really fun to get together and chit chat and swap recipes with each other. TC was also happy that other kids were there since she's usually the only child around.

For fun, I had a video slideshow playing in the background on our TV. I was remarking to Bert a few weeks ago that many of our fond memories from vacations (and home) revolved around food, so I put together some of my favorite "food memory" photos and he put them on a DVD to play on repeat. It was great seeing photos of Issan sausage from Sab e Lee, the fancy hot dogs from Hot Doug's, homemade lumpia and pancit, Laotian Nem Khao, plus desserts, drinks, and such flash by on the screen.

Until the next get together!