food offerings

Before we headed off for the vacation I might eventually get around to posting about, we went to a barbeque. I got it into my head that I needed to make a bunch of stuff to bring. I get like this. Either I want to make nothing at all or I want to make every recipe that's been persistently stuck in my head.

For that day, I tackled three recipes with varying degrees of success.



I made blueberry cornbread and a side of honey butter. The cornbread recipe is from one of the Moosewood cookbooks. (I'm never sure which Moosewood cookbook I've gotten a recipe from, because, alas, I own none of them -- I check them out from the library.) I loved the idea of this, but the middle was completely mushy. Il Fornaio and I were on the outs, it seems, at least regarding this dish. The baked parts were good, though. (For the honey butter, I just mixed honey and butter. I know this sounds like a total 'duh' thing, but I sometimes takes things too literally. For an entire summer, I was making honey mustard dressing that was just honey and mustard whisked together. Recently, I found out that people make that dressing with oil and vinegar and honey and mustard and probably some other stuff. Eh, mine worked for me.)

I also made the fabulous Catherine Newman's Gingery Napa Slaw. I'm not a mayonnaise fan, so I usually steer clear of cole slaw. But, guess what, this recipe has no mayonnaise. Perfect. Oddly, though, it still smells like more traditional cole slaw to me. This is such a quick recipe, and the dressing is good for two slaws. I used the rest of the dressing for a second head of cabbage while we were camping. (I just realized that I forgot the almonds on the camping trip. Oops. I think Cardo ate them all anyhow.) Please, please see Catherine's blog (linked through the recipe) for a much more appealing picture of this.

Finally, for dessert, I made the intensely chocolate brownies from my How to Cook Everything cookbook. I have since read that Bittman's sweet recipes aren't as successful as his savory ones, but I liked these. I have been moving farther and farther (further and further? none of those look like words to me right now) toward the darker end of the chocolate spectrum, so I prefer a strong chocolate flavor to a milky chocolate flavor. These were deeply, darkly chocolately. J pointed out that this was probably a good thing because one would be less inclined to eat the entire pan of brownies at once, but I would definitely not put it past me.