What We made for dinner

Have you ever had a night where the weather is bad (in this case a snow storm), or you went out too hard the night before, or you just don't feel like going out, but you want to have a nice meal? No? Hmm. Well, I have that quite a bit, and am fortunate enough to have friends and family that like to cook too. This past weekend it was snowing pretty hard, and Mr. What I Made for Dinner and our friend Double D decided to join forces and come up with a nice Italian meal, in order of antipasti, pasta, meat, salad and dessert. We ended up trying a couple of new recipes that were fantastic. Here's what we did:
1. Make everyone a cocktail. A must for weekend cooking.
2. Fried Olives. Double D likes blue cheese stuffed olives in his martini, and I had seen this recipe and wanted to try it. Take your olives (the big ones), stuff with blue cheese, roll in flour, egg, and breadcrumbs, in that order, and fry for 30 sec. on each side. Salty, cheesy, and fried. Mmmmm.
3. Pasta with tomatoes. Mr. What I Made for Dinner is quite good at making pasta from scratch, so I can't help you with that. I did throw a jar of tomatoes in a skillet with garlic and a couple bay leaves, and a tiny bit of cinnamon for something different and threw that on top.
3. Chicken stuffed with sausage and thyme. This was a variation on a recipe we saw for chicken stuffed with pork and sage. We didn't have the pork or the sage, but guess what we had? Cook the sausage first with an onion and some thyme, pound out the chicken breast thin, mound a little stuffing in each and secure with a couple of toothpicks. Pan fry until done, then throw a little white wine in the pan and scrap up all the jibblies. We served this with sauteed spinach.
4. Salad of watercress, pears, and candied walnuts. The walnuts are made by putting them in a skillet with a little butter, a little brown sugar, and any spice you want- I used mild curry. Dressing was just olive oil and rice vinegar.
5. Dessert: chocolate and nuts. Anything you can find in the cabinet.

This was streched out over 3 or 4 hours, so it wasn't too much food and was really relaxing. In these times of economic stress, it's good to know you can still enjoy fine dining without the state tax. Tipping yourself is optional.