BBQ Party Night

Since my friends Stan and Nishaant wouldn't be in town for long, Zack and I decided to have a BBQ party on Sunday night. We also invited Will, Fred, and Kari as well as Zack's friend Kelby and her friend Melissa. I had all my dishes planned out and the recipes organized. I picked either really easy recipes or those that I've made before. Here's my dinner menu:

• Plenty of beer
  
• Tomatillo-avocado salsa with tortilla chips (from my April 28, 2006 post)
  
• Potato and cheese salad
• Grilled corn on the cob
• Grilled asparagus cous-cous (from my April 26, 2006 post)
• Hamburgers / hot dogs / boca burgers
• Grilled pineapple with vanilla ice cream and rum dulce de leche
  

I thought it would be a piece of cake to whip up dinner and dessert. Not so simple, as it turned out. Well, the only thing that really gave me a hard time was the rum dulce de leche that I was trying to make for the dessert. Everything else went pretty smoothly. I made the potato salad using this Epicurious.com recipe. I left out the bacon and eggs, added soy beans, and substituted the blue cheese with goat cheese. I really liked the apple cider vinaigrette with the lemon peel and honey.

The rest of the meal was good too. Stan prepared the hamburger patties with chopped portabella mushrooms and jalapeno peppers. With a generous sprinkle of lime juice and chopped cilantro, the corn was delicious. For the cous-cous, I used grilled asparagus instead of boiling it like the recipe suggets. The grilled flavor was too powerful for the light and airy cous-cous flavor and texture. It was more smoky than grill-y because Zack was having trouble maintaining the heat in the grill.

I had made the salsa and had started on the dulce de leche using this recipe way in advance. The first time, I wasn't keeping my eye on the condensed milk in the oven and it overflowed all over the inside of the oven. Without realizing that I didn't follow the part about putting the pie dish in a water bath, I attempted it again! When I noticed that the condensed milk was looking granular instead of smooth, I finally realized my mistake. By that time it was too late, so I decided to salvage the mess by watering it down with milk and rum, running it through the food processor, and then straining it to get a smooth sauce. It was way more work that it was worth but it turned out fine.

At the end, I cut up a whole pineapple into eighths and grilled it on my electric stove since we had given up on using the grill by that point. I poured the dulce de leche over the ice cream and pineapple slice to make the perfect dessert for our BBQ night. Yum!