Recipe Review from 12/14/09

Holey Snowmen! I was on a bit of a cooking spree this last week! It helped that I had a couple of functions that needed extra dishes, and I probably would have had one more if I had been able to make my office potluck. I also realized I don't have any pictures. Sorry! You'll have to use your imagination.

Cranberry-Orange Scones (compliments of the San Gabriel House Bread and Breakfast, Georgetown, TX) 5.0!!
I don't have permission to post this recipe to blog-land, but just let me say these were as good as when the Husband and I visited this past June. I just wished I had made some Devonshire Cream or had thawed some raspberry jam to dollup on them. Light, medium crumb, with a deliciously browned exterior and just enough sweetness to satisfy the tastebuds. I will be making these again, maybe playing around with adding raspberries instead of cranberries...or maybe not. Cranberry orange scones are my favorite flavor!


Wildrice and Dried Fruit Breakfast (Molly!) 5.0
Molly is Office Person Extraordinaire at my local yoga studio. We recently held a staff potluck brunch and she brought this fabulous dish. It was, simply, cooked wild rice mixed with cinnamon and dried fruit, topped with bananas, brown sugar, walnuts and/or almonds, and your choice of (soy) milk or vanilla yogurt. I have to say the vanilla yogurt on top was absolutely divine. She did warm the rice/dried fruit mixture before serving.

I tried this the next day - the dried fruit is whatever grabs your fancy, or in my case, whatever I have in the cupboard, which was apricots, dried plums, and cranberries. I did find the brown sugar to be too sweet when I tried it at home, so I omitted it. So that's what went in. I have a new favorite breakfast dish! Or supper dish! Or munchie dish! It's that good.

Sun Dried Tomato Soup with White Beans and Swiss Chard (Vegetarian Times, Jan 10) 3.0
This was fairly easy to assemble, especially when I can use my immersion blender for that part where the recipe calls for "take x amount out and puree until smooth. The flavor is that of a tomato soup ratcheted up with beans, zucchini, Swiss chard, onion, and parsnips (my sub for carrots). I felt it was like a bisque style soup, with a bit of zing. VT hasn't posted the recipe yet and I'm to lazy to type it out, but it is in the current magazine. This was one of their "Honor Roll" of best up and coming Chefs. I've been enjoying this for lunches with some crackers and cheese.

Wild Mushroom and Lentil Cottage Pie (Ckng Lght, Dec 09) 3.0
Sorry, no typed recipe for this one either. For some reason it's not showing on the Ckng Lght website for me to link to. This one was a bit putzy; you have to start the mashed potatoes first, and while they are cooking, make the lentil and mushroom mixture. You could cheat and buy pre-made mashed potatoes, but I dislike using processed food.

Recipe called for "exotic" mushroom, but since I live in N MN, the most exotic that I can reasonably obtain is shitake. So I used shitake and baby crimini. I also used regular lentils instead of petite and just made sure to cook them longer. This was a satisfying dish. The dash of nutmeg in the mashed potatoes kept my tastebuds going "heeyyy, this is different, and I liked the creamy almost gravy like consistency mushroom/lentil mixture with the potatoes. Very hearty.

I did halve this recipe and still had four, almost five, meals.