Cooking 101–Lesson 2

The second primary lesson I just learned (or maybe this is the third?) is not to expect people to eat a rich dessert right after a big turkey dinner.

The dinner was great and so was chocolate soufflé, but we gathered to eat at 6:00 p.m., so we were all still very full and half comatose when the soufflé came out of the oven. Soufflé doesn’t keep. Ben and I suffered through eating our share and also suffered for it all night, but Lori and Dawn couldn’t eat much of theirs, so a big portion of my labor of love (or would that be lust, for chocolate?) went into the compost pile.

And I figured out that I really prefer mousse over soufflé. Whipped cream mousse, that is. Soufflé is fun and delicious, but no matter what you put into it, there is that decidedly eggy flavor, even to the dark chocolate variety. Now, I love eggs and I love egg dishes, but dessert, to me personally, just should not be an eggy thing. So, I looked up mousse recipes on the internet, since Julia’s chocolate mousse is, essentially, an uncooked soufflé. We’re delivering pots in Livingston tomorrow morning, so we’ll stop at the grocery and get a few things and this weekend, I’ll make a mousse for dessert. For supper, I'm going to make a stack of crepes with entrée filling and cover it with cheese sauce before baking. This is a Julia sort of dish with lots of butter and cream and cheese.

By the way, Ben and I haven’t started on our exercise program yet and we just relented – with grave reluctance -- to the weather and put our bicycles away. We’ve done few things semi athletic since our landscaping season ended,  but it’s getting late in the season and even though we haven’t been eating as many goodies as we have been lately, we haven’t lost any of the girth on our waistline emergency supply. But, then, as hard as we worked all summer, we didn’t lose much of that. Without working we’ve already re-packed what little we worked off. And, to make matters worse, I have noticed, from our big turkey dinner last weekend, the waistline of my tight pair of pants is pinching a bit more than usual. From a single meal! That’s something new.

So, the challenge to lose the extra on our emergency supply has just increased in intensity a notch or two. Yeehaw!!

 

Now that we can’t get into the mountains for a good excursion until ski and snowshoe season, I’m staring at them every day and longing for a good hike, so I’m reminiscing. Here are a few heretofore not posted pictures from this past summer.