Recipe Review 7/16/07

Last week was leftovers and this week I’m going on a mid-week camping trip, so not much in the way of new recipes is being made. However, I did promise my book group that I would bring dessert this month and so on Sunday morning I made Blueberry Cheesecake. Later in the evening I pulled together my lunch for the week: a Nicoise salad.

Blueberry Cheesecake (Ckng Lght, as adapted by Culinary in the Desert)
Despite the huge ingredient list, this was fairly easy to pull together. The recipe started with the crust, a combination of graham crackers and vanilla wafers which is baked and set aside. Then I kinda started multi-tasking by starting the blueberry topping and sauce while making the cake itself. The blueberry sauce was super simple, frozen blueberries and cornstarch are brought to a boil and thickened. Part of this is set aside for the finishing sauce. Cake was cream cheese, sugar and eggs. Pretty simple. This is placed in a prepared pan, then the blueberry topping is swirled prettily on top. While it bakes, a sour cream "topping" is made and added for the last 10 minutes of baking. The leftover blueberry concoction is added to some sugar water and boiled, with a cup of fresh blueberries folded in at the end.

I haven’t tried this as of this posting, as it needed to sit for a minimum of 8 hours (I suppose I could have had some for breakfast...) and I’ll be bringing it to the meeting tonight. I hope it tastes as good as it looks!

Nicoise Chopped Salad (w/o chicken) (Every Day w/ Rachel Ray, Aug 07)
I’ve got lettuce. Lots of lettuce. I planted buttercrunch and a mesclun mix and whoo! I’ve got lettuce. Then I went and bought some because I didn’t think it was going to be ready in time. Which means I need to start eating some lettuce.

Last week was a Blueberry, Blue Cheese with Spicy Pecans in a Maple Vinaigrette salad (title long enough?) and this week I found this recipe. Pretty simple: boil eggs, crisp tender cook some green beans, then cook the potatoes. This can all be done right in the same pot. Add capers, tomatoes, Nicoise olives (I used kalmata) and hard boiled eggs. The chicken seemed like overkill so I skipped it. Add to lettuce and toss with a Dijon mustard vinaigrette. We’ll see how it tastes for lunch today.


Oops! I forgot to add my continuation of my efforts with my pantry reduction project. I was able to use up:
1 bag of frozen blueberries
2 bags of home-made vegetarian pot stickers

Editing to add, the blueberry cheesecake was a hit with the bookgroup. Only two pieces came home with me! The Nicoise salad was very good as well, though it needed a bit of salt and pepper to bring out the flavors.