Entertaining can be a problem when you aren’t eating carbohydrates. For the record this is the South Beach/Atkins diet sorta. No carbs. But recently, in my month of pain, I managed to get a decent enough menu put together so I could entertain without shame. There was no bread, no potato, no rice, no starch of any sort : (
One trick for a successful diet dinner party is to make the menu weird/elegant or otherwise out of the ordinary. I found this recipe in Food and Wine (I have limited success with their recipes) and it looked interesting and totally weird enough that no one would think much about bread. They’d be too busy wondering “what the?” Chicken thighs with charred lemon salsa verde.
The process was a revelation and I’ve used it since for turkey thighs. Sauté the thighs skin side down and finish skin side up in the oven. In this case there were sage leaves, garlic slices and a pat of butter under the skin. (Butter is technically verboten this month too but I figured that most of it would render off and indeed the thighs were swimming in grease when they were done in the oven.
They were delicious. The salsa with charred lemon slices, mint and oregano was, meh, but it sounds good when you’re serving it at a dinner party and was at least interesting if not rockin’ delicious. My sides were Brussels sprouts and salad.
If anyone missed bread or potatoes they didn’t say. But Kate is a polite guest so she wouldn’t have said word one, and Loralyn, well, she had her eyes on the dessert plate throughout the entire meal. French sugar cookies and chocolates. I didn’t have any. It’s my month of pain.
