Antipasto

Antipasto platter, originally uploaded by beFOODled.

This antipasto was my special dish for S's party. It was a showpiece of hard-boiled egg, blanched asparagus, two kinds of canned tuna and chickpeas mixed with olive oil and salt and pepper, served on a bed of red-leaf lettuce. At the end of the night all the eggs were gone, but a lot of the rest remained. Maybe people were hesitant to break up the design or they didn't know how to eat it. We didn't provide much cutlery, only serving spoons, cheese knives and spreaders. The eggs and asparagus are finger foods and the tuna you can spread on crackers or bread. But the chickpeas were hard to grab. At the party I was impaling them on toothpicks, cocktail-olive-style. But after a few glasses of wine, it's probably expecting too much of guests to owlishly stack small round things on toothpicks, when they could easily satisfy their hunger for less work by reaching for something bigger. Anyways, it tasted great and I ate it for lunch the next day with a more conventional utensil — a fork!