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- grace: puff pastry in any way, shape, or form makes me giddy. that’s a gorgeous dish, plus “beef...
- Helen: Oh what a classic! My partner asks for this every year for his birthday so over the years I have perfected my...
- RecipeGirl: Wow, did this bring back a memory… the first really gourmet dinner that my mom took me out to- this...
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- pam: I have never had beef wellington! Looks incredible!
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Sweet “Faux” Gras Pâté on Pear Chips…wait, wtf? Chicken for dessert?
Jeff at Culinary Disaster posed a challenge among a few friends recently to make a dish using chicken. I think we’ve all made many a chicken dish before, and seeing how dessert is where I seem to have the most fun, I thought it would only be appropriate that I try to do something a little odd and make a chicken-based dessert since I thought (a) that has to stand out and (b) that sounds like a hell of a challenge. I know…dessert…and chicken? You didn’t misread, so let that one sink in and bear with me (have I ever steered you wrong, dear reader?). Trust me, this one has a happy ending!
Obviously, one has to tread carefully to get a dessert out of a chicken, and leaning too heavily on eggs seems like a crutch (given how obvious they are in dessert, anyways). So I thought I might be better off looking away from the usual breast/thighs and to the…
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Creamy Mascarpone Polenta
Poltena is a delicious, creamy side on its own right, but with more cream, butter, and some luxuriously rich mascarpone, you have a very rich side dish indeed.
This is a very simple dish and something of a blank canvas for anything you’d like to color it with (sort of like risotto–the awesome rice that demands equally awesome additions). My reason for keeping it simple will be clear in the next post (I served this as a side-dish), but if you’d like your polenta to stand out more, you’ve got many options: mushrooms, squash, beans, greens, ham, formed and deep fried–it all works and works wonderfully. Heck, you could even employ it in desserts. But additions aside, polenta, at its core, is simply boiled cornmeal, cooked and whipped so as to be light, puffy, and creamy, sort of like having a rich porridge that ever so faintly resembles cornbread. Its a good, comforting side dish that leaves a lot of…
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Vegetable Tagine
Tagines are a special kind of cookware, but they also refer to a class of food slow-cooked in a tagine. I chose to go with a Moroccan styled dish: a medley of vegetables cooked in a tagine style (a proper tagine would be cooked in, well, a tagine, but seeing how I don’t actually have one, a Dutch oven will have to do. Doh!).
This dish is easy to make, the only real killer being prepping the vegetables. I had seen a version of this dish which looked awfully appealing, so I figured I’d try my hand at it with a few twists. I chose to use this as a healthy side dish to get my veggies (main course coming up next!), but you could also tailor it to be more of a main course for vegetarians by serving a larger portion of it over a bed of rice or cous cous, maybe with a nice flat bread on the…
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Macaroni & Cheese, Cheese, …and more Cheese
Macaroni and cheese, like many “common” sounding dishes, has been misrepresented on many an occasion, whether it be powdered stuff from a box or some slop from a cafeteria. But if you show it just a little bit of love, it will love you back with some incredibly rich flavors.
So despite the many bad macaroni experiences we’ve all had, mac & cheese should not be banned from your kitchen as if it were gruel. This is not that undesirable junk that shows up on your plate at some backdoor BBQ you’d rather not be at–this is the good stuff! Plus, preparing this is actually quite simple and lends itself to experimentation. The end result is a fantastic dish with a variety of flavors going on.
If you look around for macaroni and cheese recipes, there’s really not a lot of consistency when it comes to what kind of cheese you should use–all cheddar, fontina, asiago, american (no!), etc. And…
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Risotto alla Milanese (Saffron Risotto)
Risotto is a quick and easy dish to make–it just requires that you pay it some attention. As long as you stick around to keep stirring, you should be in good shape–this isn’t a dish that you just set on heat and come back to in 20 minutes. Your reward is an amazingly creamy and rich side dish.
Risotto is traditionally an Italian dish made from a special kind of rice. When you treat risotto the way its meant to be treated, you tease the creaminess out of the rice without cooking the entire dish down into mush–each grain will still have its own individual, slightly firm and distinct shape. The result is a side dish that is always a pleasure to eat–bursting with flavor, creaminess, and the familiarity of rice. This particular version (and oh are there many!) enhances the flavor of the risotto in a very traditional fashion: with broth as the cooking liquid and both saffron and…
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Cream of Sweet Potato Soup
This soup is a great autumn/winter dish to warm your kishkas: somewhat sweet, slightly savory (in that familiar, autumny pumpkin pie kind of way), and creamy. And does anybody not like sweet potatoes?
I’ve been meaning to post this for a while now. I had actually made this on Thanksgiving–I had planned my entire dinner and dessert course, but all of my guests were from out of town, so there was still breakfast and lunch to deal with. Seeing how I couldn’t be troubled with more cooking, I instead decided to whip up a hearty soup mid-day with the promise of an early dinner that would be worth the wait. This soup fit the bill–not heavy enough to keep them from enjoying an early dinner, but not so light that you don’t feel like you ate anything. And hey, you’re getting your vegetables (sure its a vegetable that you can have for dessert, but its still good for you!). 
To be…
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