Food Friday- cooking for folks who love food

Tonight's dinner guests are foodies of the highest order. Our friend Alan is probably the only one of our guests that I will ask to bring challah.  Amy and Alan force me to up my cooking game.

When I began making tonight's chicken I pulled out a selection of red spices. 

The tag line "cooking with the reds" popped into my head. I think it sounded like a Revlon ad from the 1980's.

here is the chicken duly massaged with the red spices and waiting to be put into the oven.

Raw chicken is never appetizing, not even when covered with red spices.

Cooked though is a different story. The house smelled amazing as the chicken cooked.

Now for the roasted section of the dinner. A spicy eggplant to be served as part of the mezze course, and

 tomatoes that will be added to the salad,

Dessert is a two part deal that includes a sorbet that started out  with intentions to be pomegranate fig but seems to be the flavor that we call "Middle Eastern Garbage Pail " with  pomegrante molasses, figs, dates, walnuts carob syrup, silan, brown sugar, coconut, dates cardomon and allspice, orange bitters and coffee. 

This recipe showed up in my Facebook feed. I don't have the major ingredient, confectioner's sugar. But why should that stop me? I thought that a dry slightly bitter cookie would be perfect to go with the deeply flavored sorbet. I plan to serve the sorbet with fresh pomegranate seeds.

As I plated the cookies I thought about how my mother would have appreciated the fact that I used an actual hand knit doily under the cookies and served them on this silver plate. Thinking about my mother I put all of the ugly cookies on the bottom of the stack.

Shabbat Shalom!