Quick Aioli (Page 889)

• Date: Saturday, May 10, 2008 -- 7pm
• Location: Somerville, MA
• Kitchen: Matty's Apartment
• Fellow Chef: Matt
• Dining Companions: Matty, Mike, Ricky, Ana, Craig, Grace, Alex, Gunther, Angelica, Jenny, Vero, and Pam
• Recipe Rating: C+
  

This ailoi was one of the many mayonnaise-based sauces at our mayo tasting last Saturday. There were two aioli recipes that night, and between the two this one was the clear winner, but it still wasn't great. The texture and consistency were nice, but the flavor was just too much. Aioli is meant to be very garlicky, but this recipe was extremely heavy handed with the garlic. Almost every person reacted with a "Whoa!" when they first tasted it. Mike summarized the problem with the recipe by noting that it was spicy, but "not good spicy." It was powerful stuff. I like garlic as much as the next person, but the overpowering garlic flavor of this sauce made it not terribly versatile. On the upside, I think the "quick" aspects of this "Quick Aioli" didn't damage the essence of the aioli much. In fact this recipe was much more successful than the Eggless Aioli that was also a part of our tasting. Personally though, I would look for a different ailoi recipe in the future.

This recipe isn't online.

Tonight my special gentleman and I are hosting a dinner party for some of his friends from graduate school. He did his Ph.D. at Columbia, and a couple of his classmates have also since moved to the Boston area. A couple more are in town this weekend from elsewhere, so a bunch of them decided to get together. Strangely, I haven't hosted a regular old dinner party (i.e. one for few enough people where you can actually sit around the table and eat a meal in courses) in several months, so I figured it was about time! One of my many goals for the summer is to have more dinner parties. I love cooking for big groups of people and I haven't done enough of that lately. I can already tell that in true Teena form I have planned way too much food for tonight. Good thing I love leftovers! On the menu tonight is my favorite cuisine: Mexican food (hence the poblano pepper accident -- see earlier post). There aren't too many more meals of Mexican food that can be constructed with the recipes left in The Book... but I managed to find 7 for tonight. (Ok, in the interest of full disclosure, without even thinking I picked an Italian dessert to go with my Mexican-themed meal. Whoops. Maybe no one will notice!) Doing seven recipes alone is a little ambitious, so I made two of them in advance. So, this evening I only need to concentrate on five things at once!