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A raclette set is a tiny indoor grill with little trays on the bottom.
Ours are itty-bitty, we were trying to feed seven people, so even though our set came with two, Morgan and Shannon brought over their massive one. The main deterrent in raclette is all the prep work, because you literally have to chop a thousand things.
It's really no more work than, say, making a massive stir-fry, except that you end up dirtying every bowl in your house. Do not attempt this if you don't have a dishwasher.
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All the usual suspects were present: peppers, onions, mushrooms, broccoli. This being our first hosted raclette, I thought we'd play a game called Will It Grill (that being a misnomer, becasue of course it will grill. The real question is whether it will taste good afterwards). To that end, I threw in a few rogue vegetables like leeks, edamame beans, and eggplant. All were surprisingly tasty (full points go to the grilled leeks), which may or may not have had something to do with the roasted garlic and herbed butters that ended up everywhere.
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So! Grilling. We accidentally kept the teeny ones quasi-segregated into vegetables
and meat.
The large one was omnivoricious.
But what of the teeny trays on the bottom? That is where you throw some cheese to melt so that you can pour it over your...whatever. Or you take your grilled whatever and put it on a slice of bread with some cheese, and put that in the teeny tray and roast it. There are no pictures of the teeny trays because I was eating what was in them.
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The other problem with raclette, related to the myriad of bowls, is space. There will almost be no room on your table for your plates. You will have to relocate your beverage station to a side table, and if someone brings a leetle gasoline pump to mix cosmos in, so much the better.
In keeping with the spirit of Using Things Because I Have Them, I busted out the napkins that Gnoe sent me from the Netherlands.
My instinct is to totally hang on to these and hoard them forever, because when will I have such terrifically Dutch napkins again? But life is for living and napkins are for using, and raclette is a Swiss dish and while I KNOW THAT SWITZERLAND IS NOT THE NETHERLANDS, it's near enough.
So! With all the grilling and melting and more grilling and prodding, raclette takes hours to eat. Make sure you have plenty of time, and excellent company.
2 comments:
hehe! this looks like tons of fun (and hours of work, but whose counting?!)
This does look fun and delicious. And completely unlike any raclette party I have been to, (and I've actually been to a few) because, well, I don't see any raclette at all. Was there any? Or does raclette now just mean little tabletop grill?
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