Thursday Night Supper Club--The details and this week's menu

Alright, people. Thursday Night Supper Club is officially on!

This Thursday's menu is:

-Broiled Chicken Provençale
-Quinoa Salad with Dried Apricots
-Lemon Crème Brulée or Chocolate Tuiles with Vanilla Custard

If you're friends with me on Facebook, you'll get the update there, too. But if not, here are the details:

-If you know me and trust me in the kitchen, you're invited. :) Bring a friend (or spouse, o' course) if you feel so inclined.
-I'll make dinner every Thursday and you bring a few bucks to help pay for ingredients and whatnot.
-The cost will NEVER be more than $8-$10 per person, and I'm hoping to keep it more to the $4-$7 range.
-I'm NOT going to make money off of you--promise. The cost will be evenly divided among everyone who comes to dinner, including me.
-This isn't some weird self-promotional thing and I'm not trying to sell something to you.
-You don't have to participate every week (obviously).

I'll send out the menu every week by Monday, you let me know if you're coming by Tuesday night, and I'll have a seat and a plate for you on Thursday night. :)

Let me know if you want to join in!

If you're not interested this week, let me know if the general idea appeals, and I'll put you on my list of people to include in my weekly menu email.

Woo hoo!

Test Kitchen/Dinner Group

To help me resolve my little recipe problem, I decided to start a weekly dinner group/test kitchen combo.

Basically, I'm going to make at least one recipe from my (ahem) archives each Thursday and invite all of my Orem/Provo peeps for dinner every week.

I was thinking I would send out a weekly email with the plan for the main dish, a side-dish sign-up list with a couple of slots, and then let everyone else know to bring $3-$8 to help pay for ingredients, depending on how exotique the ingredients are. (So... if it's lobster, everyone brings $8-ish. If it's tortilla soup everyone brings $3.)

What do you think? Is it tacky to ask people to bring money? Should I just have them bring ingredients? If it were you, what would you prefer?

Would you participate in something like this if someone else was hosting?

Get Cooking!

I got "How to Cook Everything" by Mark Bittman. I think she was the one who said she learned to cook by just cooking her way through his book, and it inspired me.

Not only am I going to learn how to cook "everything," but I am also going to become a creative cook and ingredient-combining guru with the Ingredient Bible, which I bought for myself because it's my birthday.

So, if you would like to be a guinea pig, let me know and I'll invite you over for dinner, lunch, breakfast, or brunch.

38/101 - Cooking Terms, Tips, and Tools

#38 on my list of 101 Things to do before December 6, 2011 is:

Learn 100 new cooking terms/tips/tools.

I learned a new term/process yesterday. It's a bain-marie. Which I guess can either be a double-boiler-type item, or just a simple process of dumping a container filled with food into water to be boiled and therefore cooking whatever the contents are without actually exposing them to the water.

This is how I heated a package of pre-cooked quinoa, spelt, lentils, and red beans I bought at a health food store by the Hotel de Ville. On the package it said to cook by bain marie, and showed a pot of boiling water with the pouch floating inside.

So. There's one term. Only 99 to go.

So, how about some help. What is your favorite cooking word, helpful tip, or appliance/utensil that you would hate to live without?