In the days after a dinner party, I eat well... and badly. Well, because I always overbuy: too much of too many ingredients for the dinner party itself, all good things, and things that I don't want to go to waste. So lunch on those days looks less like this:
And more like this:
Which leads to the "badly" part. Dinner party food tends to be rich food, and to keep it from going to waste, I eat more of it than I should. I've been known to make hot chocolate from half-and-half because I can't think of a better way to use it. It's delicious, but not smart.
But after our most recent dinner party, I did okay: not too much pasta left over, all the appetizers gone, and most of what was left was good for me. Which led to several straight days of these:
Beet, endive, and goat cheese salad, with a little olive tapenade turned into vinaigrette with lemon juice and olive oil. Light on the cheese and heavy on the beets. And some jicama for crunch.
Which was not only delicious, but kind of photogenic, and the kind of thing that people might even eat on purpose. My side dish, not so much:
(I cut the centers out of Bouchon walnut bread to make truffled walnut toasts with homemade ricotta, but of course I hated to see the non-centers go to waste! They made perfectly decent toasts to eat alongside my salad, though they were obviously not the easiest bread in the world to butter.)
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