Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Catching Up Part I: Food

Gee, it's been over 2 months since last we posted here on the Menagerie....

In an effort to catch up, I'm going to post a bunch of pictures from the past 2 months. I thought I'd divide them up into a few themes.

First up: food.

Here are some of the things we've made recently (and remembered to take pictures of!).

Homemade gnocchi with a simple tomato sauce: (making the gnocchi was easier the second time around, and easier still with Jenny helping!)



My first attempt at Cornish pasty (various ground meats, carrots, rutabaga, onion in a pie pastry crust):


A couple of pies I made for some get-together or other (Easter?).... Cranberry pie:


And a couple of views of my very first chocolate cream pie. Both turned out very well, thank you.




I recently made quiche for the first time. I chose a traditional recipe for a traditional quiche: Quiche Lorraine, which has bacon and swiss cheese (apparently not in the most traditional versions, but hey, can you have too much cheese?) and chives. It was good-- not too eggy, which is important to me, and plenty rich.


This is one of the rhubarb pies I've made this spring. I love rhubarb, and last year I found what I consider to be the best rhubarb pie recipe out there. It's a custard, which means it uses eggs to make the filling have a good consistency, but it's certainly not eggy. I'm sad that the rhubarb is more or less gone now....


I've been making pie crust using some new ingredients this year. I bought some local lard at the farmer's market a while ago and have been figuring out how to use it. It's waaaay different from the supermarket lard I've used previously, and also very different from any other shortening I've used. So I've had some disasters: crust that was so crumbly it fell apart as I was making it, etc. But I'm getting there. The secret seems to be to use the lard as a seasoning, to give the crust good flavor, but not as a main ingredient. For that I use organic vegetable shortening and butter. Or sometimes lard instead of butter.... Experiments continue, and are tasty.

Next up: Kitty pictures!

2 Comments:

At 8:04 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Great to see new pictures. They make me hungry!

 
At 10:04 PM, Blogger leigh said...

wow that food looks soooo yummy!

 

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