Hors D'Ouevres and Canapes - Part I

 For this series of classes, we learned about and how to construct hors d'ouevres and canapes. These one-biters are meant to pop in your mouth at a cocktail hour, allow yourself tastes of lots of different  types of food at an event, and to wake up your taste buds for the meal to come, if that's the case.

Up on the menu: blinis with smoked salmon and sour cream, ceviche in cucumber cups, sushi, deli rolls, and deviled eggs. When you work with ready-to-eat food, you must wear gloves. This minimizes the risk of contamination from [even just-washed] hands.

Below, chef starting to separate the lox.

I was in charge of making the ceviche: we used tilapia, but any white fish will do. The ceviche method means to cold-cook something in acid, for example fish in lime juice or vinegar. For this recipe, we used just lime juice.

First, I cut up the fish into small pieces and added fresh-squeed lime juice to the bowl. This mixture was refrigerated for an hour and a half to "cook." You could see that after this amount of time, the acid from the juice had changed the chemical composition of the fish so that it was, essentially, cooked.

Then I made some cucumber cups for serving:

Here we go!

Here you can see classmate Eugenia making the blinis (buckwheat pancakes)

Beautiful!

Here, chef is demonstrating the proper rolling technique for sushi:

Here's the sushi! It's a combo roll with homemade spicy tuna, kani (fake crab), cucumber and avocado.

Here's my sushi roll: 

Spicy tuna is my favorite roll, so I snagged some to try my hand at rolling:

Since the class was working on different recipes all day, we made a platter at the end of class to show off our work.

Hungry yet?

A blini with a spoon of sour cream, salmon roe (fish eggs), and a chive.

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Ceviche

8oz (1/2 lb) white fish filets

1/4 cup fresh squeezed lime juice

1/2 small white onion, chopped

1 small Serrano or jalepeno pepper, minced

white pith and seeds removed

2 plum tomatoes, small dice

1 TB cilantro ew.

1/2 tsp cumin powder

1 TB olive oil

sea salt to taste

Rinse fish filets and pat to dry.

Cut into a small dice, place into a bowl, and squeeze fresh lime juice over top.

Put the bowl in the fridge to chill for 2 hours. In the meantime, go have a drink or catch up on last week's shows.

Then, remove the bowl from the fridge and add more lime juice as needed. The fish should have turned from translucent to white. 

Add all other ingredients and served  chilled, with cucumbers.

Enjoy!