Scenes from Dinner Parties Past

I thought I should post some shots of some dishes from my past dinner parties.  This may be a good way for some of you to familiarize yourselves with my cooking style.  I really do aim to please, and the most important thing to me is that the food tastes good,  more so than looks good (a misfortune for the food shots).  I think  my dishes are comfort food in the best sense of the term.   My cooking is definitely Italian-inspired in flavors, and I always try to practice the philosophy of letting the ingredients shine by keeping it simple.  Really it's all about a table full of happy and satisfied company, and the following shots are some examples that:

Ok, I know I know, I cook a lot of Italian food, luckily people REALLY like it!  Clockwise from the top left: Italian sushi (risotto sticky rice and parma seaweed), a Duck Ragu with gemmelli, Olive Pizza with an onion sauce, Baked vegetable and mozzerella stuffed paccheri, Shrimp and homemade fettucini tossed with pistachio pesto, and lastly, Shrimp risotto with winter vegetables. 

In keeping with the Italian theme, these are Butternut Squash and Fried sage Arancini, I love making rice balls and coming up with interesting fillings for them, major crowd pleaser, extremely time consuming!

This is sea bass cooked en papillote (in parchment), and when I learned the technique during my awesome month at the French Culinary Institute, I had to go home and make it again.  Of course, I served it over pappardelle:)

These are "chimay" style eggs, I like to describe them as the best deviled eggs you can ever have, and boy are they devilish.  First they are hard boiled, their filling is the yolk, sauteed mushroom and shallots and bechamel sauce.  Then turn your bechamel into mornay by whisking in gruyere, coat each egg, sprinkle some more gruyere and broil the top.  Everyone has the same reaction to them (if they like eggs): they pop it in their mouths and with two full cheeks their eyes pop out of their heads.  Something else I have FCI to thank for.

This is from my last dinner party for a friend's birthday.  She wanted some french food, so I made her some crudites and mayonnaise to start, followed by my rendition of a dish I ate in Paris, basically a duck shepherd's pie (picture does not do it justice-bottom right) moving on to steak frites and mayonnaise (I triple frited the frites), and we finished with cinnamon french toast stuffed with apricot jam and brie with local honey drizzled on top. 

So there you have it, I think this will familiarize you with what I do.  Hmmm, it actually looks like I can only cook Italian or French food.  I swear I can do other cuisines too!  I live in Astoria, I've learned a lot of different tricks from different cuisines over the past 7 years, I promise!   You'll just have to come see for yourselves.