Category Archives: Supper Club

Friends giving 2016

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This year as I sat down amongst eleven dear friends at our Friendsgiving table and I couldn’t help but think about the saying, “If you have more than you need, build a longer table, not a higher fence.” It’s so simplistic, yet holds such truth and so much beauty, especially during this holiday season.

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When we all sat down together to dig into our delicious spread, we all went around the table and shared what we were thankful for. It was one of the best memories that will stay with us when we think back on this very dinner. Listening to each person express how truly thankful they were for friends like us, like those around the table, made anything else going on just melt away.

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The American Thanksgiving of course is not celebrated here in Korea, but that doesn’t stop us from pillaging our local vegetable market for local goods to make it happen. Over the years we’ve learned the hard way that a big ol’ bird simply doesn’t fit in our tiny “easy bake oven”, so we improvised and purchase an already made Turkey (a deep-fried one at that!) plus we sous-vide extra turkey breast and baked a ham in our crockpot. To make all the sides work, we borrowed another small oven, giving us a total of three ovens to work with. Talk about handling the heat in the kitchen… whew! SO.MUCH.FOOD. In the end everything worked out perfectly! We were pleased with all of the meats being moist and flavorful, and it was by far quicker to purchase and sous vide! (Check out that carrot cake too! A friend of our’s had it made with little bumblebee on it! Swoon!!)

Speaking of turkey…. THIS little turkey had a teeny bit of her first Thanksgiving turkey too!

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As always….we are very thankful for all of you too… for those that have stuck by us, reading, commenting, viewing our photos and virtually traveled all around the world with us. Thank you friends! Happy Thanksgiving from Korea!!

Backpackbees

Our Late Octoberfest Celebration

Over the weekend we celebrated Octoberfest with some friends…yes, yes.. a tab bit late…but eh whatever. We raise our “steins” to our favorite German flavors like sausage, pretzels, warm German potato salad, German Beer Cheese, rotkohl, apfelkuchen and yes, beer. Prost!

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Backpackbees

Newest Supper Club Member

Perhaps the youngest as well….

While she isn’t eating foie gras just yet, she has been mashing her way through all sorts of veggies and fruits these past few weeks like a champ! Next stop…sushi and kimchi!

(Kidding… Kidding…we’ve got at least a few more weeks before that 😉

Backpackbees

A love language of dinner and vino

We’ve said it before, but will say it again, our love language is sharing food with our family and good friends. There is nothing like eating delicious home cooked food and sipping on a glass of vino!

Over the past two weeks we’ve entertained a new friend visiting from Thailand, and we hosted a low-key vino night, who doesn’t like an excuse to bust out the cheese board and pop open the vino with good friends?!

Gahhhh we we’re sooooo in our happy place!

Backpackbees

Gather. Eat. Drink. Repeat

Friends, we certainly missed you at our table over the weekend!

We gathered, ate, drank and repeated all evening. Nothing better in our book!

These friends are friends that have cooked a special birthday meal for us and have given us such wonderful gifts, we’re very blessed to have met them all, so we certainly wanted to return the favor with a special treat for them!

The menu was French themed and featured the following:

^L’Apéritif (Drinks): Assorted beer, cocktails, homemade mulled wine

^L’Entrée (Appetizer): Pan seared foie gras served on homemade whole-wheat toast

^Le Plat Principal (The Main Dish):
Sous vide duck breast, served with fresh steamed broccoli, and pommes frites (french-fries)

^La Salade et le Fromage (Salad and Cheese):
Seasonal dinner salad and assorted cheese plate (served on my favorite Pennsylvania board)

^Le Dessert (Dessert): Vanilla-bean crème brûlée with local strawberries

Le Café (Coffee) : Coffee & tea

Bon weekending!

Backpackbees

Happy Friendsgiving!

We have a lot to be thankful for this year. 

If you’ve been following along with this blog for a while, you know that our annual tradition is to have Friendsgiving, rather than a family-filled Thanksgiving, due to our logistical separations. We kept our theme to our meal to a smaller scale this year and also kept it centered around everyone’s traditional Thanksgiving fare. Eek we just get so excited for in the weeks that lead up to our dinner.

We live for the menu planning, the prep and yes, even those million little last second details that keep us buzzing around here and there. Year after year when all of our guest have left for the night, we head off to bed, we both look at one another and smile talking about how everything was so worth it in the end.

(Missing two and it was a test shot)

(Now just missing one)

This year we hosted 8 at our table…well 9 if you are counting 😉 little Miss B. We extended our dining room table by one leaf, it worked out perfectly.

The spread consisted of: Mr. B specialty Mashed potatoes; my side of the family family’s broccoli casserole and baked corn, My in laws homemade dressing (because it’s outside of the bird) my grandmothers stick to your ribs macaroni and cheese, my great grandmothers raw cranberry sauce, my homemade applesauce made with local Korea apples, sage leek and onion balls made by Mandy, the deep fried Cajun turkey, a ham prepared by George, crescents, a spinach pie baked by Jovone, pumpkin pie, cheesecake, vanilla and sparkly golden hazelnut macaroons, and an almond raspberry cake. Using the word delicious for this feast is just an understatement!

A close up of my plate. Ha-ha! As usual, my peepers were much bigger than my stomach. Of course I did manage to leave room for dessert.

Friendsgiving with our lovely friends was a beautiful, sweet, cranberry-kissed, happy affair! Thank you for making it another excellent memory friends!!

Backpackbees

Backpack Bees First Annual Supper Club

The only thing that seems to be regular around here is my lateness in blog post lately. EEK! So what have you been up to and what in the world have we been up to? Well, I can fill you in on us and you’ve got to leave us some comments below on you. Lets see… Ah! We hosted our first annual supper club at our place last weekend.

Yup, we gathered up 7 sort of strangers around our wooden table in our cozy little South Korean apartment, added a touch of good tunes- mind you it has to be an excellent mix, had oodles of laughs, kept the wine glasses filled, took a heavy dose of creativity and openness from both the host and the supper club goers.. and welcome to the Backpack Bees first annual supper club! (Sounds like the opening of the The Real World , right? LOL..Na…nowhere near as dramatic).

We had these bigger than big ideas to whip out our KitchenAid Ravioli Maker and make homemade ravioli. Pretty awesome, right? Right and it was! Let’s fast-forward to the actual day of the supper, when we quickly realized we had never even used our ravioli attachment… oops.. How hard can it be? I mean we used the pasta attachment for spaghetti before. Easy-peasy!

HA-HA..well in the end the pasta came out delicious but I’ll keep it real and give you the backside of the story. Mr. B whipped up an excellent homemade tomato sauce and the ravioli vegetarian filling (ricotta, spinach and shiitake mushroom). Then moved onto dredging the eggplant into a Smoked Paprika breadcrumb mixture, later to be deep fried. While I on the other hand was struggling with the dough, on the verge of almost a mini-panic attack. Thankfully in walked two of our dear friends with vino, smiles and helping hands. Together we all quickly went to town manning almost assigned kitchen stations and managed to pull it all together. Thanks again guys!

BACKPACK BEES SUPPER CLUB MENU:

Rolls (Thanks Danny & Katie)

Fresh Greek Salad

Lemon Parsley White Bean Salad (Thanks Mandy)

Breaded Smoked Paprika Eggplant Bites

Vegetarian Homemade Ravioli -Stuffed with Ricotta, Shiitake Mushroom and Spinach Topped with Homemade Tomato Sauce

Homemade Vanilla Bean Ice-Cream

Homemade Strawberry Basil Ice-Cream

Homemade Apple Tart (Thanks Megan)

Who’s joining us for dinner next?

Backpackbees

Click, Ship & treat yourself!