My family started the tradition of celebrating Chinese New Year over fifteen years ago. I know we had celebrated it a few times before I moved to Arizona because, toward the end of my first year out there, my new friends made sure that we celebrated in style so I wouldn’t feel homesick. My family celebrated the years between my return from Arizona and my departure to Texas, but we haven’t celebrated as a family since my return to New England. When I felt nostalgic for the tradition, I threw myself my own personal Chinese New Year’s feast. It wasn’t the same without the fireworks, burned papers to the ancestors, and other quirks of the family celebration. But it was good enough to sate my nostalgia.
The tradition of the Annual Chocolate Dinner started almost four years ago when some friends and I were just sitting around and chatting after the Holiday Dessert Party. I don’t remember what got the ball rolling, but I do remember our discussing how chocolate was such a diverse ingredient. At some point someone suggested a chocolate dinner party, and light bulbs started flashing. It took us until February to get our schedules aligned, but that first chocolate dinner was so amazing that it wasn’t difficult to fill a table for the Second Annual Chocolate Dinner the following year. It was even easier to fill the table for the Third Annual Chocolate Dinner. So my really good friend Bea and her crew were not at all surprised when I started asking in early January about dates for the Fourth Annual Chocolate Dinner. Once I had their commitment to a February date, I set about inviting the others. And it didn’t take very long to fill the table for this dinner party either.
I’m almost positive that it was me who came up with the idea of combining the Fourth Annual Chocolate Dinner with Chinese New Year this year. I really wanted to celebrate each tradition, yet the commitment to two consecutive dinners parties seemed a little too much. Since the date for our dinner party was set right between the beginning of the Chinese New Year and the feast day of Saint Valentine, I thought it might be interesting to do a mash up and call it Chocolate Chinese New Year.
Menu Planning
Of course, the first hurdle in planning Chocolate Chinese New Year is that there is no such thing as chocolate Chinese food because cacao is native to South America. The closest thing that I know of are chocolate haystacks, which basically are chow mein noodles mixed with peanut butter chips and coated with chocolate. And that doesn’t really count!
My plan was then to offer complementary courses of chocolate infused dishes and Asian inspired dishes. I wasn’t all that concerned about what Asian inspired recipes to put on the menu. It’s been forever since I held an Asian themed dinner party with my friends, so I could easily haul out the family cookbook and pick out a few tried and true favorites. I was definitely craving the family recipe for Chicken with Cashews, which dates back to a newspaper clipping from the 1970s. Other than that, I figured I would decide on the Asian components of the menu after I had settled the chocolate components.
I was, however, concerned about the chocolate components of the dinner. Each year that I host the Annual Chocolate Dinner, it becomes progressively more difficult to find new and interesting dishes to present to my friends. Sure, having an Eat Your Books account makes it easy to see the newest recipes added to my favorite websites and blogs, as well as to sort through the over 37,000 recipes indexed from those electronic resources and my personal cookbook library. But only 36 of the chocolate results were for main courses, and at least a half dozen of those recipes were actually for desserts. Not that I am fundamentally opposed to the idea of chocolate turtle brownie sundaes as a main course, it just doesn’t help me with my menu planning. None of the remaining recipes struck my fancy, as they were basically for moles, stews, and chilis. I already have a tried and true mole poblano recipe, and I like to serve something more elegant than a stew or a chili when I have friends over.
I checked my hostess book to review the past Chocolate Dinner menus to see if there was a favorite main course that should be revisited. For the past two years, I have made one variation or another of cocoa-spice rubbed ribs. At the inaugural Chocolate Dinner, I served a pork tenderloin rubbed with a cocoa spice mix. Since I had recently learned how to cook a pork tenderloin so that it was neither dry nor raw, I thought that might be a good idea. It was basically a “set it and forget it” dish after the spice mix had been prepared. And since everyone has loved the chicken mole poblano recipe from the Cook’s Illustrated cookbook, I decided that would be on the menu as well.
When I turned my attention to the appetizers, I found what looked to be a terrific recipe for steak kabobs rubbed with coffee, cocoa, and ancho chile and served with a stout molasses pan sauce. Unfortunately, the recipe involved both soy sauce and all purpose flour, which would not make it very friendly for my gluten free guest. Because nothing else really interested me in that list, I changed the filter from “appetizers” to “canapes/hors d’oeuvres.” The two results included chocolate covered strawberries and Mexican spiced chocolate pecans. I had been thinking of serving some type of nuts as an appetizer, so I added pecans to the (first) shopping list.
Sure enough, in the midst of my research, I received an email from Food and Wine promoting their chocolate desert recipes. In that slideshow, there was a recipe for adorable chocolate mice. They were made from crumbled cake mixed with cream cheese, shaped into ovals like mice, dipped in chocolate, coated with cake crumbs, and accented with black licorice for a tail and pepitas for ears. I already had chocolate mousse and gluten free chocolate cakelets on the menu for dessert, so I figured that I could repurpose the gluten free cakelets into chocolate mice if I had some free time to get super creative.
Of course, I got nothing done the weekend before Chocolate Chinese New Year, even though I had the ingredients to make the raspberry cocoa jam, the Mexican spiced chocolate pecans, and the mole sauce. In fact, I didn’t even get my menu completed until Wednesday night. Which meant that I didn’t do my grocery shopping for the party until Thursday night - after both work and the gym. Which meant that I didn’t get everything necessary for the menu, and would need to go back to the grocery store on Saturday morning for fresh meat, fresh bread, and chocolate mousse ingredients, in addition to the forgotten items leftover from Thursday’s spree.
Friday Night Cooking
A terrific friend from graduate school (let’s call her Ali), who lived across the river from the City, had planned to come up to my house on Friday night. So I had planned to take her out to my favorite bar in town after her arrival for a drink and a bowl of really good ramen. But she decided to postpone her trip up until Saturday morning because she wasn’t feeling well.
I should have been energized on Friday night to clean out my refrigerator, clean out the sink, start cooking, and do a few other tasks to get myself in order. But it had been a long week for me, so I was more motivated to get a good night’s sleep than to work in the kitchen. I did manage to prepare the ancho-cocoa dry rub for the pork tenderloin from my Jim Tarantino book. That was super easy to make, especially since I had found my extra jar of ancho chile powder the weekend before. Unfortunately, it didn’t smell like the homemade cocoa rub hiding in my dry goods cabinet, so I was really hesitant to combine the two before the party.
Making the base of the Szechuan peanut sauce for the glass noodles was the only other task that I managed to complete on Friday night. I doubled the recipe, being careful to use the gluten free soy sauce and check the other ingredients for trace amounts of wheat flour and other gluten. The only thing that I didn’t do was mix in the chicken broth because that would have required me to find a spot for it in the refrigerator overnight, and I wasn’t prepared to play that game of Tetris just yet.
Saturday Morning Cooking
It was a rare occurrence that I woke up fairly early on Saturday morning ready to go into the kitchen and cook up a storm. I started with the raspberry cocoa jam because that required at least six hours to set. Also, I hadn’t heard from Ali when she was coming up, so I wanted to get it out of the way because, once the recipe is underway, it really shouldn’t be interrupted. Unlike last time, I took the time to read the jam recipe before I started, so I actually caught that I should mix the pectin and the cocoa together, but measure out the sugar into a separate bowl. I felt a little bad about not crushing the raspberries in advance so that they could be properly measured. Instead, I trusted the recipe at its word that about four six-ounce packages were sufficient. As it turns out, the raspberries disintegrated completely during their brief period of boiling with the cocoa and pectin, so the crushing step was for naught. After the raspberries, cocoa, and pectin came to a boil, I added the bowl of sugar. Typically traditional jam recipes are equal parts fruit and sugar, but the quantity of sugar in this recipe was almost one and a half times the quantity of raspberries. But I wasn’t feeling experimental enough to cut it back; I just went with it. The recipe said to just bring to a boil and let boil hard for one minute. I knew better than to follow that direction! I let it boil until the mixture reached 220F, which ensured that the sugar was all melted and the jam wasn’t gritty its high sugar content. Once the mixture hit the desired temperature, I pulled it off the heat and started the rather tedious process of water process canning. In the end, I filled fifteen four-ounce jars and one eight-ounce jar. The eight-ounce jar was simply covered with foil and set out on the appetizer table to be served with dinner, while the four-ounce jars were properly canned so that they could be given out as party favors.
As the mole sauce was cooling, I started on the Mexican spiced pecans. The recipe was simple enough: measure the cocoa and all the other dry ingredients, whisk an egg white in a separate bowl, add the dry ingredients to the egg white, add the pecans to the spice mixture, bake until toasty, cool. Alas, by that point in the morning, I was starting to lose some energy and enthusiasm, so I decided to skip the two tablespoons of finely minced dark chocolate. I wasn’t sure how much chocolate I’d have to chop to make two tablespoons of finely minced chocolate, and it was too much mental energy to figure it out. But the spice mix seemed to work without it, so I mixed that into the whisked egg white until there was a smooth ball of chocolatey goodness. I did take the effort of weighing out exactly one pound of pecans before I added them into the bowl. It took some elbow grease, but I did manage to get the pecans all fairly evenly coated with the chocolate mixture. I was quite pleased that I had the foresight to line the baking tin with aluminum foil before spreading out the coated pecans. I had a feeling that they would clump and stick as they cooled, so I’d want to be able to peel them off easily. And that’s exactly what happened!
By the time I had set the pecans to cool, it was around noon. Ali texted that she had just missed an earlier train, and would be catching the one o’clock train. Between the two of us, and the Amtrak app, we figured out that I would have to pick her up at around 245pm. That gave me about two hours to run to the grocery store to fulfill my last list, blend the mole sauce, remove the spiced pecans from the baking tin, and prepare the sauces for the two stir-fried Asian dishes. Being so close to seeing Ali gave me the spurt of energy that I needed to see it all through to completion.
Saturday Afternoon Cooking
After I showed Ali to her room and around the rest of the house, I naturally offered her a drink. She declined the drink but accepted the chair that I offered her in the kitchen. I had about two hours left to finish my pre-dinner tasks, but I couldn’t think of anything that she could help with - other than talk with me as I cooked.
Between preparing the chicken for the Chicken and Cashews, making the chocolate mousse, and preparing the gluten free chocolate cakelets, I decided that it was more important to get that chicken done first. If I didn’t, there wouldn’t be much of an Asian component to Chocolate Chinese New Year. So I pulled the chicken out of the refrigerator, cubed some breast meat and some thigh meat, mixed it with an egg white, and dusted it with corn starch. Of course, because I wasn’t measuring, I added too much corn starch and had to dump the extra out into the sink. Then I heated a bottle of canola oil in my wok to 375F and started to deep fry the cubed chicken. All the time talking with Ali about what was going on in her life. At some point, Ali commented on the fact that I hadn’t looked at a recipe during the whole time that I was working on the chicken. I really didn’t need to since it was a family recipe, and I had read it quite thoroughly before leaving for the train station.
Once all the chicken was draining on the paper towels, it was time to turn my attention to the chocolate mousse. But I decided not to. Bea’s sister had made a batch of raspberry macarons filled with chocolate buttercream and last year’s batch of raspberry jam, and Bea was making chocolate caramel muddy buddies, so there was really no need for more desserts. In that moment, it was more important to give Ali my full attention, so we retired from the kitchen to the living room and just chatted. That was definitely much better for me than stressing over melted chocolate, whipped cream, and meringue!
After about an hour of chilling, it was time to get back to work. Ali finally accepted my offer of a drink, so I mixed a batch of Tiger Beat cocktails, because I was in the mood for something light and refreshing. I’m not really sure what the original Tiger Beat recipe is composed of, but my adapted recipe called for bison grass vodka, elderflower liqueur, Lillet, and lemon juice. It was a perfect match for my mood. Ali enjoyed it as well, once she got past the shock of all the odd liquors that I had in my collection.
We took our drinks back into the kitchen so that I could start the water for the rice and turn on the kettle for the saifun, which are clear bean thread noodles. Ali set the table with plates, napkins, and silverware as I moved food to the appetizer table so that we would be all set for the guests’ arrival.
Sure enough, Bea arrived with her crew shortly after I added the jasmine rice to boiling pot and poured the hot water from the kettle over the saifun. And they brought wine, macarons, muddy buddies, chocolate hummus, and strawberries. While they set up their stuff on the appetizer table, I got the chicken into the pans, poured the mole sauce over the chicken, and popped the pans onto the top shelf of the oven. Then I got another pan for the pork tenderloin, coated that with the ancho-cocoa rub, and popped that onto the bottom shelf of the oven. Since the chicken would take 30 minutes or so, I set the timer and went to join the ladies in the other room.
Our last guest, my really good friend Cea, arrived with her pup shortly after the rice was ready. I just turned off the heat and let the rice sit until needed. Since Cea wanted to help, I asked her set up the steamer with the green beans. I was using the recipe from the Chinese New Year cooking class at the cooking school, but I decided to adapt it from deep fried green beans to steamed green beans because I didn’t want to deal with the oil.
I chatted with Ali, Bea, Cea, and the other ladies until the green beans dinged. That’s when things got crazy. First, I stir-fried the green beans in the wok, adding the sauce down the side, cooking until the sauce slightly thickened. But I decided to skip the cornstarch slurry because I was being a bit lazy. After I dumped the green beans into a bowl, I started on the Chicken and Cashews. I poured the deep fried chicken chunks back into the wok, slid the sauce down the side of the wok, added way too many cashews, and then stir-fried until the sauce coated the chicken and thickened slightly. I found a bowl to dump that into, and one of the ladies brought that to the table. Of course, after that made it to the table, I realized that I forgot to add the green peppers to the mix. Oh well!
Then the timer for the chicken mole rang, so I checked the internal temperature of both the chicken (165F) and the pork tenderloin (145F). After the chicken hit the table, I started to carve the pork tenderloin. And it was raw! So I walked away from it and sat down at the table. Of course, the ladies were nonplussed by the failure of the pork tenderloin. They suggested I stick it back into the cooling oven so that it would cook some more.
The macarons and muddy buddies were the fabulous end to the meal. Sure enough, everyone was having such a great time that Bea and her crew stayed a few hours later than usual, chatting, drinking wine and coffee, and picking at the desserts. Being from out of state, both Ali and Cea both spent the night at my house. So we opened another bottle of wine and stayed up chatting. Ali tapped out first, and I tried to keep up with Cea, but she noticed how tired that I was and let me get some sleep.
Sunday Morning
All three of us convened downstairs at some point the next morning. Of course, I had already made the coffee, so we started with that. And then I had the bright idea to mix Bloody Marys, using my favorite recipe from Serious Eats and my bottle of horseradish vodka from the distillery in Plymouth, Massachusetts. After Cea finished a round of dishes, we three moved to sit in the living room and chat about life and other important things until I realized that I was quite hungry. I left Ali and Cea to make the decision as to whether we would go out to a diner for breakfast or whether I would make us all pancakes and another pot of coffee.
The pancakes won the vote! So I broke out the red box of pancake mix and started that process while Cea started on another round of dishes and Ali kept the conversation moving. Before long, there were four stacks of pancakes on the plate, with two types of maple syrup and the raspberry jam from the night before all ready to go. I ate my pancakes with the jam, and it was so good.
As we all kicked back and rubbed our sated tummies, Ali piped up that she needed to be home by a certain time to bail her pup out of the puppy hotel. I checked the Amtrak schedule and found a few trains that could get her there, if we left right then. In under five minutes, all three of us - and Cea’s pup - were packed and out the door. Fortunately, Ali made a train that got her home at a decent hour and Cea had very little highway drama, so all ended right with the world.
The Verdict
Yet again, I amazed myself with how quickly and easily the dinner came together once I got motivated to start things in motion. And I was surprised how little the overall dinner experience was impacted by my choices not to do certain things. That definitely says something about how gracious my lovely dinner guests were: they highlighted the successes, downplayed the failures, and focused on enjoying each other’s company.
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