Serious Eats: Recipes
Cook the Book: Black Olive Mini Blinis with Pink Mascarpone, Salmon, and Preserved Beet
[Photograph: Oof Verschuren]
Home Made is a great cocktail party cookbook. Author Yvette van Boven has put together helpful tutorials on how to stock your home bar with all sorts of tasty infusions as well as enough bite-sized snackables to keep your guests sated all night long without serving a formal dinner.
Keeping with the DIY theme of Home Made these Black Olive Mini Blinis with Pink Mascarpone, Salmon, and Preserved Beet embrace two of van Boven's made-from-scratch techniques: preserving and working with yeasted doughs. Here, thin slices of parboiled beets are quick preserved in honey and raspberry vinegar and the yeasted dough is for fantastically nutty little buckwheat blinis.
Once your little pancake-like bases are crisped up, they are split and sandwiched with mascarpone, a bit of beet juice for color, salty slices of smoked salmon, and a single disk of sweet and sour preserved beet. Totally elegant and absolutely impressive, these blinis are just a taste of the wonderful apero hour snacks that van Boven shares in Home Made.
As always with our Cook the Book feature, we have five (5) copies of Home Made to give away this week.
Reprinted with permission from Home Made by Yvette van Boven, copyright © 2011. Published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang.
