Dinna pah tee, dahling.

Erin and I are hosting a small dinner party tonight at Commonwealthy. I excite. This is my element, this is what I live for. Sometimes I wonder if I should just be going to culinary school and opening up my own catering business. I love to cook, entertain and make people feel like they're being taken care of. Yep.

Here is the menu for tonight:

Appetizer:

Either a veggie tray (carrots, English cucumber and blanched broccoli) with garlic veggie hummus,

or

An antipasto plate with olives, capers, sweet pickles and natural pepperoni or smoked peppered turkey breast(see above left).

Salad:

I will be preparing an Autumn Salad with Maple-Cider Dressing (drool)

Ingredients:

Baby Spinach
Crumbled Blue Cheese
Sugared Curry toasted walnuts
Red Onion
Bartlett Pears

I'll let you know how it goes, but it got a five star review from every person that made it on myrecipes.com so it can't be horrible, right? I'm really hoping it will look something like this, because, well, this is quite pretty.


Main Course:

I stole a great soup recipe from my mom. I always loved coming home on a cold day to the smell of this soup in the kitchen. I'd always steal the tortellinis out of the pot before we actually sat down to eat (whoops), mind you I was merely stealing tortellinis while my dad was finishing half the bread loaf as an appetizer. But he works out like a madman and also ironically brings the bread HOME (think about that). So Marty can do as he pleases.

Anyway, it's a cheese tortellini soup with cannellini (white kidney beans), kielbasa and kale. Bread suggestions? Ciabatta? It is somewhat of an Italian soup. Or I could go with your basic french baguette, possibly a multigrain loaf. Your thoughts are always welcome.

For dessert I thought we'd keep it light and just do some spiced hot cider. And if that doesn't do it for them, they can just steal my mini-mint freezes from Trader Joes out of the freezer (essentially mint ice cream within an oreo, only 60 calories per cookie, girls).

**Recipes for tonight's dinner can be found:

here

here

and especially

here

Today's blog post brought to you by the letter "O" and the number 15.