Summer afternoon comfort food

How nice is it to share delicious food with friends and family on a late summer afternoon. Weather is perfect after 6 pm here in Ontario and after having an incredibly rainy day we were rewarded with amazing comfortable warm weather. Today’s blog is about comfort food inspiration.

What’s your favourite food to cook for a get together?

I cook mostly Peruvian unless I’m baking in which case I cook mostly French desserts, but it is nice to leave your comfort zone sometimes and venture into exploring new flavours.

Lately we’ve been exploring one of Yotam Ottolenghi’s books and I have loved all the flavours so far and experimenting doing my own versions, like the little brioche pizzas

The recipe called for caramelized onions and olives but I replaced these ingredients. I kept the dried tomatoes in the recipe but before popping them in the oven to dry for an hour added a hint of chicha de jora – a Peruvian fermented vinegar – as opposed to the balsamic vinegar. I threw some nice crimini mushrooms in a pan with butter and thyme leaves, added high quality spicy sausages and ended with thinly chopped dill which I have been loving lately not only with seafood! It goes well with mostly everything!

I also made classic meat Peruvian empanadas, dusted with a hint of powdered sugar and with sliced lemon on the side to sprinkle a few drops in every bite.

The pasta dish called for samphire which can be compared to baby asparagus. I didn’t have either of those so chopped my regular asparagus length-wise in four pieces. Not really difficult but could be time consuming if you are not skilled with the knife so for those I would recommend going with the baby asparagus or samphire.

My dear friend Robin brought an amazing pavlova dessert that he made (also inspired by Ottolenghi), but he used dried apricots and blackberries, and it was the right call! It was next level delicious. We enjoyed it at the end of the meal with some nice Prosecco. Perfect way to end the evening.

I’ll leave you with some pictures to inspire you to cook for your loved ones. It’s comforting in a special type of way.