Yesterday, Ryan hosted an AV Fest, during which we covered Ikea lamps with filmstrips and watched Mental Hygiene short films. There was a great deal of food, and some of that was made by me.

I made basil leaves stuffed with goat cheese, pork wrappers, chicken liver mousse, potato cheese sticks, salsa, roasted garlic and caramelized onion dip, and basil lime spritzers. Jon made guacamole, and Ryan made scones and mojitos (as well as cutting up the veggies served with the garlic-onion dip).

We do like going overboard with the foodstuffs. Jon’s guac, as always, was superlative. The scones Ryan made were fantastic- she has these wonderful dried cherries from Michigan, and she incorporated them into the dough. I don’t know how good I’d be at making scones. They require a quick hand, and I tend to dawdle over things. Well, I guess biscuits demand alacrity. Maybe I’ll try the scones in the near future. Man, were they good.

Julia Child’s chicken liver mousse is amazing. Totally kicks my recipe’s ass. Adding an entire stick of butter and some cream really does wonders.

The garlic-onion dip was… okay. It tasted weird with the carrots, but with more bitter vegetables, it was good. I should have thought better than to have the sweetness of both the caramelized onions and the roasted garlic.

The potato cheese sticks didn’t really turn out right. The mixture tasted fine- maybe a little overbeaten, but fine. (I don’t own a ricer, so I kind of mashed up the potatoes with a fork. Clearly, this was not going to yield the same results.) I could not get them through the pastry tube at all. I ended up shaping them into little patties and baking them. They tasted pretty good right out of the oven, but I had made them the night before, and these were an item that needed to be served fairly soon after baking.

The basil-lime spritzer was kind of a surprise. I’ve wanted to make it for a while now. I have a binder full of clipped magazine recipes, and the recipe for the syrup was in the middle of the first page. Whenever I went in there to find something, it taunted me. Really, it’s not very hard to make, and it’s really quite refreshing. Ryan had some lime-mint-sugar mix left over from the mojitos yesterday, and so I went over today and made some more. I made a few changes- added some lemon zest to the first step, and included some mint with the basil during the blender step. It was kind of a “why the hell not?” thing to make, and I was glad it turned out so well.

Yes, I made the pork wrappers for people. And they liked them. Jon even made a little dipping sauce with soy and rice wine vinegar. Seriously, every time I make them, I’m just going to feel dirty. Sandra Lee made a sauce with Cheez Whiz on Semi-Homemade yesterday. CHEEZ WHIZ, people. I fear for our nation’s digestive systems.