Schmancy Pomegranite Rolled Chicken Dinner Party

We had friends over for dinner last night, and I got a bit ambitious with a recipe off my former tri-club cohort Andrea’s blog that sounded scrumptious.  Pomegranate-glazed rolled chicken, a salad of roasted red peppers, golden raisins, fennel seed and baby spinach from my Blue Eggs and Yellow Peppers cookbook, and finally dimply peach cakes for dessert.  Also, my friend Rune was bringing his two children, so I made my fantastical Annies Mac and Cheese for them!  (Full disclosure: Earl & I would have been just as happy eating that, too… we looove Annies!)

The reason we went with Pomegranate-rolled chicken is because I have been CRAVING pomegranate seeds… like crazy.  It’s so funny, I’d never even had a pomegranate until a month ago when Earl grabbed one when were grocery shopping and threw it into the basket.  “What’s that?” I didn’t even know what it was!  LOL, I had written off pomegranates as a “fad” fruit and sort of lumped them into a trendy/health craze thing that I couldn’t be bothered with.  One of my personality flaws traits is that I will write things off when they gain sudden steam as a fad and never make the effort to check them out for myself because I will assume they are all hype.  But to my surprise and delight, we were reading in bed one night and Earl comes over with a bowl full of pomegranate seeds and … DAMN they were so good!  I have been obsessed ever since.  Unfortunately, we’re just on the END of pomegranate season here in CA, so they’re becoming hard to find.  Hard enough to find that last week I accidentally ordered some pomegranate seeds online that are only for hermit crabs (Earl caught this and we cancelled it).  I was happy to find some fresh seeds at Trader Joes on Tuesday.

So dinner turned out… “okay.”  There were no complaints, but I wouldn’t say it was a knock-out-of-the-park like when I made the prosciutto-wrapped, sage-stuffed pork tenderloin, either.   My biggest problem?  Not giving myself enough time!  I was in the shower frantically scrubbing down 15 minutes before everyone was showing up, while the peach cakes were burning and the rolled chicken still needed to be put in the oven.  Aggh.  The hardest thing I have to master when it comes to cooking is figuring out the timing of everything- when to start all the different things, how to time it for when people show up, and when to actually start all the prep work.  And the chicken was pretty labor-intensive, so I was behind, behind, behind and it slowed down everything.

Anyways, we had fun catching up, the kids were adorable, and there was plenty of wine, so of course it was a great evening regardless of any wondrous culinary accomplishments on my end.

Here are the photos:

About to start the peach cakes, buttering the ramekins

ramekins ready to go

Peachcake ingredients, dry and wet.  In the background is recipe for the fennel, roasted red pepper and baby spinach salad in the background.  I need a cookbook holder.  This actually crashed over at one point and spilled the bottle of wine all over the floor.  Freaking cookbook weighs like 10 lbs, too!

peachcake ingredients

Adding zest of lemon and orange to the peach cake batter

zest of orange and lemon added to batter

slice some peaches for the top and ready to bake

add sliced peaches to the top

red peppers being cut for the salad

salad

oh, here we go.  chicken of doom.  man, this was a pain.  so the chicken here is seasoned and about to be filled with mozzarella cheese and spicy Hungarian paprika.

season chicken, add mozzerella and hungarian paprika

but, here was the hard part- you have to tie it all up with string!  tying little string bows around wet, slimy raw chicken while trying not to let the filling fall out is majorly hard.  it took me about 3 tries per string, which is 6 attempts per chicken.  plus, i was paranoid about touching anything and spreading chicken guts disease, and had spicy paprika all over my hands too.  add in the fact that i’m not all that great when it comes to handling raw meat (getting over it, but… this whole ordeal brought back some of that queasiness), and man.  so yeah, this part was a shitshow.

roll up the chicken and tie with strings

ah-ha! the chicken is wrapped and onto simpler endeavors!  brush with pomegranate paste.  this i can do

brush with pomegranate paste and mayo

table is set, time to hop in the shower

table settings

fucking hell.  I burned the freaking peach cakes.  (actually, they weren’t really burned, just… crispy on the top, but i would say a few more minutes and they would have been goners.  once we got through the top crust they were actually very good! note to self: cakes RISE do not fill up to almost top of ramekins)

kinda burnt, overflowing peach cakes

roasting red peppers, fennel and golden raisins for salad

golden raisens, fennel seeds and red peppers

ze final product!

voila!

crowd approves (note two munchkins in background who are noshing their Annies)!

Rune, his wife Angela and their two children Luke and Ole in the background

and dessert.  i gave everyone a dollop of vanilla ice cream (and the kids had ice cream sundaes) which i think made up for the crispy top.  melty-ice-cream makes EVERYTHING better

peach cake a la mode

Young Luke was very silly- he wanted to go in Linus’ kennel and wasn’t happy until we LOCKED THE DOOR.

Luke being silly in Linus' kennel

E and Rune catching up (the last time we saw Rune was when he flew to NYC for our housewarming party at our UES apartment)

Earl and Rune

It was really fun having them over.  One thing I think I want to do is get some “kid friendly” activities and have them on hand for when guests come with kids.  Now that we’re getting to be “a certain age” a lot of our friends are with child- in fact, my friend Johannes and his wife are coming over next week and they have two kids as well!  Since E and I don’t have a TV, it’s hard to entertain the kids when they’re here… not like you can just pop in a video for them.  And we do not plan on shutting them ALL in the dog crate.    Maybe I should get some coloring books?  Hmm, hmm.