Around the holidays, we’re always looking for ways on how to minimize our portion sizes. I've got some great ideas on how to mini size. And what I use are just things that I already had in my kitchen. Now, I'm going to make my Caprese salad on a skewer. Take some cherry tomatoes and just half them. If you don’t have skewers, you can simply use toothpicks or even chopsticks work. Now, I have some mini size mozzarella balls, but if you can't find mini mozzarella balls, you can always get a larger one and cut it down to size.
Now, making the Caprese salad is one of my favorites, but you can come up with any other salad that you can easily skewer. I'm going to start off by skewer my tomato, and I'm going to take some fresh basil. And what I'm doing here is I'm just alternating, I put tomato, mozzarella, I'm going to put another tomato, some more mozzarella, a little bit more basil, just skew it on there.
I'm going to finish these off with some extra virgin olive oil. Okay, drizzle then a little bit of fresh ground salt, fresh ground pepper, some balsamic vinegar. Underneath this, I have some fresh lettuce leaves, and that secures the skewers from moving around, especially if you're going to pass them. And there you have it, our Caprese skewers.
My next mini sized appetizers are called chilled soup shots. And what I use here is just shot glasses. They don’t even match. What I put in them are little thrive garnishes. Now I have a Starbucks soup, this is tomato soup, but you could use carrot and whatever kind of soup you want to serve. If I'm going to use hot soup, I would use espresso packs. That way, they would have a hand on them and get firm.
We’re going to garnish it with a little sour cream. Now, I'm going to garnish these with some fresh basil, simply nice flavor at the end. Now, I'm going to finish it with a little fresh ground pepper. And here we have our mini sized chilled soup shots.
I love serving things with spoons, especially little salad bites. And one of my favorite salad recipe is this Gorgonzola Grape salad. I start off with some seedless red grapes, throw that in the bowl. Little bit of red onion, then I break up my gorgonzola cheese. Now, I love the way the tanginess of the gorgonzola place off the sweetness of the grapes and savory bite of the onion. I'm just going to peel this in. You can even do the caprese in these little salad spoons. I just happen to love grapes and gorgonzola.
Now, I'm going to put in a little red wine vinegar. I just love this recipe, it's so simple, yet it's so flavorful. Then some extra virgin olive oil, a little bit of fresh ground sea salt, and of course, some black pepper. Okay, so before I put the salad into my spoons, I'm going to align my spoons with some leafy greens. Spoons should always be a one bite appetizer.
Alright, now I'm going to start filling up my spoons. Make sure you get a little bit of cheese, a little bit of grape, a little bit of onion, plenty of olive oil, plenty o vinegar, make each bit perfect. Little one-bite wonders.
Now that I filled my spoons, I'm going to put them on a plate that I lined with breadcrumbs. I garnished my breadcrumbs with some dried basil. This secures my spoons, so that when I pass them it won't go flying all over the place. So during the holidays, instead of super sizing, I say minimize.