Just a little more about my delicious long weekend (and more pictures!) 27 November 2007 12:06 pm
Posted by Tracy in : baking,eating,eugene,friends,garden,pictures,restaurants , trackbackI know, I know, my Thanksgiving posts have been pretty gloatful, but this weekend’s culinary awesomeness neither began nor ended with Thanksgiving. I already mentioned our little éclair adventure, which for me got things started on Monday night, when I made pastry cream:
That’s a pint of half and half up there, woo!
That one might be blurry because I was all excited that I’d been clever enough to save the egg whites, which I used in Tuesday’s Green Tomatoes Parmesan, aw yeah. The next few steps are boring:
and you’re just going to have to imagine the part where I slowly drizzled in the hot half-and-half, whisking all the while, and then returned the whole mess back to the saucepan to cook it until thickened up, at which point I poured it through a thin wire mesh strainer (my hands were too full to use the camera). Instead, here’s a picture of the end result to prove I got all that other stuff right:
Yum. The pastry part came on Tuesday, as did the chocolate and the generally feeling like we were the sexiest people alive (also, I’ll happily take one more chance to mention Green Tomatoes Parmesan, which made lovingly delicious use of some of the last fruits of my garden). Peter made cheesecake on Wednesday night, and I’ve already gone on and on about everything that made Thursday so great. On Friday I got called into Morning Glory for a few hours, but I didn’t cook anything there that could compare to the deliciousness that awaited us on Saturday night at Iraila. Here’s a scan of the menu (as always, click on the picture to check out bigger/ more readable versions on Flickr.):
Yum and yum, I tell you what. My favorites were the courgette-apple-hazelnut salad (because I didn’t expect it to be pure garlicky deliciousness), the chickpea-rice pilaf (because it was awesome), and the baba au rhum, which Kenne confessed aren’t strictly Turkish, but so fantastically good that I will happily take the extras away from anyone who wants to whine about authenticity. They’ve got really good baklava on the menu if you really need something more from that corner of the Mediterranean, so chill out and enjoy!
On Sunday we finally ate the salad and Brussels sprouts that hadn’t made it into our Thanksgiving feast, and those were both fantastic, but I only got a picture of the sprouts, which I cooked Chiara-style, with lots of olive oil and love:
The love part came easily, what with the homegrown produce and thinking about awesomeness. Yum.
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http://www.allchiara.com Chiara
