Combing Two Loves

One of the things I missed writing about during my blog hiatus was our Dinner Diva's evenings! When I last left off it was my turn to host for January. I wanted to come up with a creative theme versus just doing a country, or color, or ingredient, something like that. What I came up with was, "Recipes from/or Inspired by a Book." Since I love to read and so many books either have food as the central theme or the setting inspires recipes or themes I thought this would be perfect. Of course I had no particular book or recipes in mind when I selected this theme.

Turns out it was slightly harder to come up with recipe ideas that I originally thought it would be. I read a ton of books, like Slim to None, a cute romantic comedy that had a recipe after most chapters, or Life from Scratch, which centered around a cooking blogger, but nothing really stuck me to make for my big dinner. I tried to look for recipes from books like The Twilight series, Hunger Games, The Help and so many others. After some extensive googling, here is what I ended up coming up with for my menu (from what I remember anyway):

• Italian Green Salad Inspired by Eat, Pray, Love 
• Leek & Potato Tart with Gruyere from Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
• Southern Style Collard Greens from The Help
• Rosemary Orange Chicken from The Hunger Games
  This is what Katniss eats when she has lunch with Cinna. She describes it with great detail in the book: Chicken and chunks of oranges cooked in a creamy sauce laid on a bed of pearly white grain, tiny green peas and onions... I try to imagine assembling this meal myself back home. Chickens are too expensive, but I could make do with a wild turkey. I'd need to shoot a second turkey to trade for an orange. Goat's milk would have to substitute for cream. We can grow peas in the garden. I'd have to get wild onions from the woods. 

I'm so mad, once again I forgot to take pictures of our lovely dinner. I had set the table using books as the centerpiece. It was nothing fancy but still cute for the effect. The Leek & Potato Tart turned out pretty good, it was really easy to make since you used pre-made biscuits as the pie crust. The collard greens were another experiment. We all tried them, they were ok, but really not my thing. The recipe makes an obscene amount and I only made a third of what it called for, I can't even imagine if I made the full recipe, it must feed an entire Baptist Church! Good thing I have a Mother that LOVES collard greens, in the freezer they went and home to Mom who enjoyed them.

The chicken though was another adventure all together. The recipe requires you to sauté the chicken on the stovetop and then put it in the oven. Well, while I was transferring my chicken to the oven part of the juice spilled out into the hot oven and caused it to smoke up, so there went the oven! It stunk and couldn't be used till we did a self cleaning, but at least the chicken turned out ok even without going in the oven.

For the rest of our dinner the girls brought over "I don't want Earl's Baby Pie" from Waitress. Although I thought this was just a movie and not a book, but Gina was stuck for ideas. Technically though I never actually got through reading The Help, I only saw the movie so I cheated there too. For dessert, Janet brought over one of her own creations based on a scene from 50 Shades of Grey. I have yet to read those books, I doubt I ever will, but her and Gina loved them. Aside from spilling the juice from the chicken in the oven it was another great night, maybe next time I'll get it right, I think last time I hosted, I accidentally cooked a knife in the pan with the pork loin!