If you are in a bit of a tizz over a variety of things, may I highly recommend getting together with a group of girlfriends and having wine and a lot of snacks? I can’t even express how reviving it can be. This morning I am a new, freshened Swistle.
I would like to tell you about this little gentleman, which I debuted at last night’s get-together:
One of the appetizers I like to do is a couple packs of Hillshire Farms little beef smokies cooked in a frying pan on low/medium for awhile so they get all nice and toasty-looking, plus a container of creamy/spicy mustard sauce to dip them in. I make the sauce by mixing mustard, mayonnaise, and creamy horseradish sauce; it’s a slapdash thing, but if I were making about 3/4ths cup of the sauce (which is gracious plenty, but if you make less it looks as if there isn’t enough and people are hesitant to take any), I’d guess I do like half mustard, half mayo, and a good tablespoon or more of the horseradish sauce. Creamy/spicy ketchup sauce sounds gross but is also really good: for the same 3/4ths-cup amount, I’d do mostly ketchup but maybe two tablespoons of mayo, and then a good solid squeeze of sriracha or some other spicy sauce, maybe TWO good solid squeezes. Bring a little box of toothpicks for anyone who feels weird just picking the hot doggers up with their fingers, and bring a spoon for each sauce so people can put some on a plate and dip each little hot dog as many times as they like.
ANYWAY. Benefits of this appetizer: surprisingly good, very easy, keto-friendly. Downsides: difficult to figure out how to keep them warm. Before last night, what I did was heat a baking dish in the oven, and then transfer them to it when they were done in the frying pan; then I put the hot baking dish on a towel in a cardboard box for transporting, and brought a hotpad to put the baking dish on at the host’s house. But…that didn’t keep them much warmer for much longer. So I bought the little crockpot to see if that would be better.
Here is what happened: the little crockpot DID keep them warm the whole evening. BUT: it made it harder to serve them (the crockpot had to be plugged in, of course, and then you had to go over to the little crockpot, remove the lid, get out some little smokies which were hard to see against the black interior of the crockpot, replace the lid), and ALSO it continued to cook them. I didn’t notice until I was on the way home and snitched a little smokie for the road and it was very, very cooked: dry and shriveled and dark. No good.
So. Possible solutions include: cooking them less ahead of time (but then they wouldn’t be Just Right at the beginning of the evening when most people are serving up); putting them in a sauce in the crockpot; unplugging the crockpot after the first hour; saying never mind about the crockpot for this particular appetizer and figuring out a different way to keep them warm longer; find a different appetizer that works better in the crockpot.