Food at CreateleVoyage's Potluck Gathering

3/01/09, Saturday - Over the last weekend, Createlevoyage (an online Christian Arts Magazine) organised a small New Year's potluck gathering at Aaron and Nam's place. Prior to that, we had our bi-monthly core team meeting at Annabelle's new home. After the meeting, we went to buy some groceries with likes of drinks, crackers, mushrooms and even more mushrooms. Subsequently, we headed to our host's place to whip some food before all the guests arrived.

At their place, Aaron helped to chop up some mushrooms and sausages before throwing them all into the aluminum tray. Annabelle and I were giving some instructions of how to prepare this dish which was called, Annabelle CLV Surprise. Reason being, there are so many things inside this dish and each piece is like a surprise. You basically have no idea what you will be getting. Hah!

Anyway, Aaron chopped up Button mushrooms, Portobello mushrooms, King Oyster Mushrooms, Chicken Sausages, Onion Sausages and Cheese Sausages. Annabelle raved to us on how the aftercooked taste of the King Oyster Mushroom tasted similar to abalone. I must say, it really tasted like an abalone. After all the chopping, he sprinkled a little pepper, Mediterranean Spices and then spread some butter onto the food. Mix them well before putting the tray into the oven. However, do not put salt as the mushrooms will absorb the saltness of the sausages and the butter. Cook for about half an hour and voila!

The mushrooms really absorbed the saltness of the meat and as a result, there was a nice balance of saltness and the mushroom flavour. As there were some juices oozing out of the mushrooms, we dipped it with pita bread and it was fanastic!

On the other hand, Nam was really nice to bake us some cookies called, Hamantaschen Cookies. It means Haman's Cookies. This lovely pastry derives from Israel and the cookies actually represent Haman's triangular-shaped pockets which were filled with silver coins given to him to kill the Jews. Nam bought a recipe book, "Simply Israel" while on her trip to Israel in November and since then, she has been trying out some of the recipes. Many a time, her effort paid off. Well, we are lucky to be able to sample some of these Israel dishes.

She used Raspberries Jam and Apricot Jam as her fillings and to prevent the filling from spilling out of the cookies, she put a little jam inside of the dough.

Here is the first tray of the cookies.

And here is the presentation of the cookies on the plate for everyone to munch on.

Here is another angle of the cookies.

I really love the sweetness of the cookies. It was really good! I have a few of those raspberries one as I don't really like Apricot filling.