Brie en Croute

Ok, since I live in DC it's a little far to fly home for Thanksgiving (read: too expensive). And since I'm not living near any relatives I had the pleasure of celebrating Thanksgiving with my roommates this year (and a few other awesome people). My roommate who planned this event did a fabulous job. (I brought the stuffing and a cherry pie.) But she started out our meal with a delicious Brie en Croute with Apple Compote for an Hors d'oeuvre. You may want to note just how awesome her Brie turned out. Mine doesn't look so pretty.

So anyways, yesterday was our Christmas party at work and I had planned on making this pie but after having eaten pie with almost every meal for the last week I just wasn't feeling it. (I'm realizing now that I don't think I've blogged about pie much. I will make every attempt to remedy that in the future.) And then I remembered the brie. My roommate readily shared the recipe with me and away I went. It turned out great. It tasted just like it should have, though my puff pastry did unfold rather a lot during baking and so it didn't look particularly pretty.

Now, someone who was thinking ahead would have taken pictures when the brie was fresh from the oven and gooey and delicious. As we all know I'm not that person. Me remember to take pictures? never. But I did remember enough to throw my camera in my bag to take with me to work. Unfortunately the lighting in my office is about a fluorescent as it gets and is pretty awful. I know I apologize for my photography more often than not, but bear with me. One of these days I'll cook during the day and actually snap a well lit photo. Just remember, it tasted delicious.

Croque-Monsieur and Lemon Posset

It has been quite a while since last I wrote. Never fear, I have been cooking even in my long absence. My first new adventure was to make Croque-Monsieur. Essentially it is a hot, ham and cheese sandwich, though since it utilizes Gruyere cheese it tastes immeasurably better. This recipe uses the broiler part of your oven, to toast the bread. I found though that if I left the sandwich under the broiler only long enough to toast the bread then the sandwich wasn't warm and melty. So after initially toasting the bread I turned off the broiler and just let the sandwich sit in the oven to warm, before toasting the last slice. This made the sandwich nice and warm. Which is the way that all hot, ham and cheese sandwiches should be.

The next thing I experimented with was a Japanese recipe--chicken teriyaki. The sugar mixed with the soy sauce made for a delicious glaze on chicken, and served over Jasmine rice it was quite delicious. This recipe has you simply marinate your whole chicken in the teriyaki sauce, and I think that next time I will go ahead and cut my chicken up into smaller pieces before marinating so that I get more surface area, and also so that it doesn't take as long to cook.

I completed off my day with a new dessert recipe. Lemon Posset. A posset is a 16th and 17th century drink. A sort of drink that consists mainly of curdled milk and ale. Fortunately my posset really had neither, and due to the wonderful invention of the refrigerator my posset also had a consistency more like a custard than like a drink. This lemon posset is more than merely a pudding, it has a bit of grated lemon rind in it and so that makes it have a sort of satisfying crunch. The posset definitely fulfills the requirements of being cool and creamy, but it is also quite rich so you can't have more than a few spoonfuls at a time. Which I suppose isn't really a problem.

A few days after I made all of these wonderful dishes I made pretzels for one of my meetings at work. Pretzels are both surprisingly easy to make and extremely time consuming. I most certainly under estimated the time that I would need to prepare them, but they really were quite delicious, and use just regular ingredients that I had around. The pretzels went stale surprisingly fast but I suppose that if I had eaten them faster that wouldn't have been such a problem.

It has been a busy couple of weeks cooking-wise, but I am excited that all the things I made turned out so well, hopefully the luck will hold.