100 Great Tapas (edition 2007)

(Amy) I love food. Anyone who's ever seen me can offer corroboration of this fact, because I look like I love food, but that's not quite the point I'm going for right now. What I'm trying to say is, I love food, and I love to make food even more than I love to eat it, and I love to have parties and give food to lots of other people. Pretty much any time we invite someone over to dinner, I go entirely overboard and make about eight different things, resulting in an overly full table and a collection of leftovers that is just plain ridiculous.

Any of my readers who happen also to be in my family know that I came by this tendency honestly.

The increasing interest in tapas is one obvious way around this problem: It would let me serve a variety of foods without anyone being expected to eat much of any one thing, and the variety becomes an intentional feature rather than evidence of my "feed the world" neurosis. Everyone wins!

This book is an excellent collection of recipes. Despite reading it after dinner one evening, I found myself hungry as I read descriptions of chicken and blue cheese croquettes, pomegranate and yogurt-marinated lamb skewers, assorted empanadas, eggplants stuffed with saffron ground lamb, fried goat's cheese balls with honey... Wow, now I'm hungry again, and I just had lunch. I'm planning to have a party Real Soon Now to have an excuse to make some of these things!

Highly recommended for people who, well, love food.
(http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/zenos-library/2009/01/100_great_tapas_pippa_c...) ( )