Dinner with a friend

The other day, we invited one of our friend for dinner. We wanted to meet up with her earlier but it had been already over a year since we last met. She is very busy and she is always helping others and very positive person. There are lots of things which I should learn from her. Anyway, even though she is a great cook and we love her food, since we wanted her to relax a little bit so we decided to invite her and make some dinner.

This was also first time for her to meet our son. She brought many gifts for him and also for me!

I made chicken enchilada again! This is the dish which our friends who came to visit us from South Africa made the other day. It is still not as good as his chicken enchilada but it was quite good.

I also made some rice which I learned in a Cuban cooking class a few years ago. (Click here for that post)
This was somehow watery and was not a success but my friend liked both of the dishes :-)

We talked about lots of things. It was really nice to have a nice dinner with her.

She is such a great cook and she cooked many great dishes for us in the past. I love learning new dishes from her so we promised to each other to cook together again sometime soon. Here is the link for the post of Shrimp Biryani which I learned from her and tried. 


For dessert, I made strawberry tart. I made tart crust and then add custard cream and whipped cream and topped with some strawberries. This was easy but really good. I know I will be making this again.
It also look pretty isn't it?

It was so nice to have her over for dinner. We definitely should do this again very soon. Next time, I am looking forward to learn new Pakistani dish :-) Can't wait!

Onion & Mushroom Tart, Tomato & Basil Tart

I was looking at a tart recipe book which I borrowed from a library and decided to make savory tart with some ingredients which I had at home.

This is the book I was looking at. Doesn't this look good? 

This book has both savory and sweet tart but I wanted to make some savory tart for dinner. 

I had onion, shiitake mushroom, tomato, basil and cheese so I decided to make two different kind of tart with these ingredients. 

First, I made tart dough and bake a little bit with some weight before I add some topping. I think you can see some of the rice on the side fell which I used for the weight. 

So, one kind of tart was with caramelized onion with some sautéed garlic shiitake mushrooms with some cheese on top. The other kind was tomato, red onion and some basil with cheese. 

Then I put them in the oven for about 30mins. Here is what came out. 

On top of these tart, I sprikled some truffle balsamic vinegar cream which I bought in Germany. I have been wanting to use this truffle balsamic vinegar cream but I didn't know exactly for what. When I made these tart, I thought these might go great with this truffle balsamic vinegar cream so I tried. This is how truffle balsamic cream look like. 

It looks great with this truffle balsamic vinegar cream and it tasted wonderful also. A sharp balsamic flavor enhanced the flavor of the whole tart. 

These tarts were great but I think it might have been better with some puff pastry. After I made these, I realized that the cover of the book was also with puff pastry. I would like to try it with puff pastry next time. But it seem like making puff pastry is more difficult and time consuming. I am not sure if I can successfully make puff pastry on my own but I would like to try sometimes... :-)