Hors d'Oeuvres!

I'm throwing a party tomorrow night at my mom's house. The menu promises to be exciting, but here's a preview. I haven't come up with an original recipe in awhile, so I'm pretty happy about these. That's not to say they're particularly innovative, but it's always exciting when something turns out perfectly without a recipe.

For the filling:

• 1 package cream cheese or neufchatel
• 1 pound brown button mushrooms
• 1 sprig rosemary
• 6 large sage leaves
• 5 sundried tomatoes (the kind packed in a jar of olive oil)
• 2 tablespoons oil from the jar of tomatoes
• 1 can artichoke hearts
• salt and pepper

Allow the cheese to sit at room temperature until soft, about an hour. Heat a sautee pan over medium high heat, then add the olive oil from your sun-dried tomatoes. Dice the mushrooms into pea-sized chunks and chop up the herbs, and sautee over medium high heat until the mushrooms are cooked through, slightly brown around the edges, and have started to shrink slightly from moisture loss.

While the mushrooms are cooking, chop the sun-dried tomatoes into very small pieces unless you like chewing on big chunks of it. Roughly chop the artichoke hearts and squeeze as much water out of them as you can. When the mushrooms are done, let them cool a little. Then mix all the ingredients well with the cheese. Taste for salt and pepper, because depending on how salty your tomatoes and artichokes are you might need as little as a pinch or as much as a tablespoon.

To assemble, thaw a piece of puff pastry according to the instructions on the box, then roll the pastry out to half its original thickness. Cut into rectangles about one by two inches long. Fill with a teaspoon and a half of filling, wet the edges of the pastry, and squeeze the edges together. Bake at 350 degrees for ten minutes, or until the puff pastry starts to brown around the edges. Let cool a few minutes before serving!

I also practiced making bouquet balls.

I'm no fan of the concentric two colored bouquet, but it helped me keep an eye on how well I was doing the perfect circles.