Southern Cooking Relish Tray
Relish Plate
Oh dear! My hostess, a real southern cooking entertainer, asked me to bring a relish tray to her Christmas Eve dinner. She was going to serve hot roast beef on Sister Shubert rolls for the main course. At first my mind was blank, but it all came together when I started with ripe olives and green stuffed olives. The ripe ones are always a hit when they’re pierced with slender stalks of carrots and celery. How easy can you get? Plus the children loved them!
So here’s what I came up with. It’s easy. Just think of yourself as an artist – after all, you’re making a picture - an arrangement of food to tempt the eye. The beauty is, it’s all so nutritious, full of antioxidants, vitamins, minerals – and lovely enough for royalty.
Ingredients:
Celery
Carrots
Zesty dill spears
Bread and butter pickle slices
Red Sweet Peppers
Spring green onions
*Hard-cooked egg slices
Roman Lettuce
Italian mix giardiniera (the cauliflower mixture upper right)
My manta regarding hard-cooked eggs:
Never, ever, serve a hard-cooked egg that has a dark, ugly hydrogen sulfide formed around the yolk. Yuck! Who wants that? Not one.
This is so easily to avoided by bring the eggs to a boil and immediately turning the burner off and letting them set for 20 minutes on the burner. Then immediately drain, add cold water and some ice cubes so they will cool quickly. Crack and peel and voila! Perfect hard-cooked eggs like the ones you see here.
