Remember that chicken I deboned?  Surely you didn’t think I let the rest of it go to waste!  No – instead I made homemade chicken stock for the first time ever, and it was awesome!  I threw in the bones and various innards along with celery, carrots, onions, and a bunch of water.  After simmering it for four hours, I wound up with this:

Success!  And it was delicious, too!  I wound up making two different soups out of this: a vegetable-noodle soup that I didn’t take a picture of, and a potato-leek soup with onions.

I think if there was ever a reason to debone chickens more often, it would be for the stock.  This stuff was amazing, and gave a nice, rich undertone to the soups.

After our delicious description of the main course for Easter, it only seems fair to highlight the rest of our fare!  Our good friends N&A, and their two boys N&L, came over to celebrate and enjoy some tasty food.  They brought some deliciously roasted asparagus and cheesy scalloped potatoes to the party, and they were seriously yum!

D pulled a tasty bottle of wine, too.

He’s been into rioja’s recently and tries to find reasons to serve them whenever he can.  =]

For dessert, D whipped up a delicious black bottom custard pie, which was spectacular!

(Trust me – there’s chocolatey goodness buried deep inside.)

It was a wonderful and blessed Easter, and we were thankful to share it with good friends and delicious food!

For the April Daring Cooks Challenge, Lisa from Parsley, Sage and Sweet has challenged us to debone a whole chicken, using this video by Jacques Pepin as our guide; then stuff it, tie it and roast it, to create a Chicken Ballotine.

Friends – this was a doozy of a challenge, but I think that added to its charm!  I don’t know that this will become a regular way of preparing chicken for the time being, but it was interesting and made for a spectacular Easter dinner!

And yes, I did use a video to guide me through the process.  Jacques Pepin is a master at this – he goes through it slowly-ish in the video, but claims that anyone can debone a chicken in 1 minute.  Hah!  But I could see after a try or two it only taking 10ish minutes to do the whole thing, which is pretty reasonable.  And after all, why wouldn’t you when a little bit of work can give you this:

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This was a pretty simple recipe that I used directly from Paula Deen.  I may disagree with many of her recipes, but cinnamon rolls deserve to be rich, buttery, and delicious!

In continuing with our New Year’s Eve series, our next course on the list is the cream of duck soup with blueberry relish:

Now, I’ve had some concerned readers inform me that they think the soup sounds gross, and that they weren’t sure what all of the stuff was floating in it in the above picture. And I agree that the picture looks a little weird, but man — this is the best-tasting duck brain, gallbladder, and spleen soup you’ll ever eat.

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So, I’m posting this a little bit earlier than I had planned to (since we’re doing a roundup of our deliciously extravagant New Year’s Eve dinner), but I just couldn’t wait any longer.  Why?  Because this dessert was amazingly delicious, and yet light enough that you didn’t feel like you had to be rolled out of the house after eating it.  (This was a key factor in my choice of this dessert – after a rich, rich dinner, I wanted something tasty and light.)

Doesn’t that look delicious?  The beautiful thing about this recipe is that you could easily just make the chantilly aux framoise and serve it in a ramekin or glass, and it would still be amazing!

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Ok, so I’m running a little bit behind on these. Whoops (are we surprised?)

As I mentioned in my New Year’s Eve post, I’m going to be writing up individual posts about each of the recipes that we made for our New Year’s party this year. Well, except for the appetizer course (because I’ve already written about it) and the dessert course (because K made it, and she informed me that I didn’t give it the proper name in my introduction post — but whatever, I couldn’t pronounce the proper name). So today, we start off with Pasta Carbonera!

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It’s Christmas time!

Wait, what’s that?  Christmas was last month?

Oh.  Well… I only just got around to doing my Christmas baking, so… I guess that’ll just have to do!  (And if you don’t like it, tough.)  =]

After my grand and glorious adventure of making stollen two Christmases ago, I decided it was high time to make it again, and to make a lot of it.  Hence:

(I apologize for the low quality photo – D was out of town when I was baking, and had our nice camera with him.  My normal camera is currently living at work, so I had to resort to my cell phone.  Sad day.)

Anyways, this isn’t even all of the loaves!  Obviously, there’s the half-eaten one on the plate, but there are two additional loaves that I had already given away.  Mmm.  This year I made a chocolate-chocolate stollen, and an orange-craisin sollen.  All of the wrapped packages should have arrived at their intended homes by this point.  If not, well, then I guess you’re getting a preview of what’s coming your way, and it’s delicious.

Happy January!

I hosted a dinner a few weeks ago, and served this delicious dish.

It was super easy to make (in part because I didn’t peel the fruit), and it used up the remaining honeycrisp apples, gala apples, and pears that I had around the house.  I rough chopped five fruits, covered with a mixture of brown sugar (3/4 c), flour (1/2 c), oats (1/2 c), butter (1/3 c), nutmeg and cinnamon, and baked for 30 minutes at 375.  Yum!

(Original recipe from Betty Crocker.)

And to prove it, I’m going to show you two different grouper recipes I’ve done in the last month!

Grouper #1: With crusted pecans, and grilled carrots with a Balsamic vinegar glaze.

Grouper #2: Over a bed of grilled bell peppers, with a chopped Brussels sprouts and pancetta salad.

That’s right, it’s time for another recipe roundup! This is where I realize I have a bunch of stuff I cooked a long time ago, and I don’t remember how to make any of it, or if it’s any good, but I figure I’ll post pictures of it anyways.

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