Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Meyer Lemon & Blackberry Bread Pudding


Not everything I make comes out well. Here's a perfect example. After making homemade brioche, drying & toasting it and then adding the cream/egg custard it turns out the brioche was just too fresh to soak up the custard. I ended up with a bread-custard pudding. The berries and meyer lemon addition were wonderful. I'll try this again but next time I'll use very old bread, not brioche that I made specifically for the bread pudding. Did I mention that we ate it anyway...

Apple Upside Down Cake

Here's an apple upside-down cake that was better than it looked. It reminded me of mom's pineapple upside-down cake that she made with canned pineapple rings and cherries with Bisquick. This recipe has a much better cake, thanks to lots of butter, and the apples have soaked up that wonderful brown sugar glaze. I used the Cooks Illustrated recipe with Granny Smith apples.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Seared Black Cod on Sun Dried Tomato w/Spinich Risotto


It's been awhile since I last posted and it feels like I haven't been cooking in about that long. Well, I'm back and loving my new home in Santa Barbara. I've checked out the local fish and prepared a fresh caught Black Cod over risotto for my first foray into photo blogging again. Here it is in all it's glory. The fish was delicious but was very oily, hope it's all that super good for you Omega 3 oil. Over risotto was OK but next time I'll prepare it differently. The original recipe called for a basil pesto over top, but I don't have a food processor or blender so I improvised with a gremolata alla Osso Buco and the bright lemon flavors were an added plus to the oily taste of the fish. Enjoy!

Monday, March 2, 2009

Sausage with peppers, onions & eggplant over polenta.

Here are pics of last nights dinner. I didn't photo blog the preparation of the sausage/peppers but basically it was a saute of everything with the addition of some garlic and tomato sauce. I use a product from T. Joes called Starter Sauce. It comes in one of those box type containers and is a great staple to keep in the pantry. This all went into the oven to bake while we watched a movie on a rainy Sunday. It was great and the leftovers will be just as good for a quick meal this week. Here are the pics....

Pictures of the sausage with peppers
















Pictures of Bread for my brother











Sunday, March 1, 2009

The learning curve

Sorry I didn't get this in the correct order. I am just learning to blog with this site and wrote the explanation first then posted pics. I should have done it in reverse order so scroll down to find the explanation for the pictures. Downloading them takes a little too long so I'll work on resizing them to make it go a little quicker but they're fantastic, you'll have to admit.

I took pictures of dinner tonight and the HB said "I'm going to have to take that camera away from you". He loved the dinner of Polenta with Sausage, peppers, eggplant & onions in a spicy tomato sauce. Yum!