Culinary Experimentations

Today was a positively beautiful day.  I woke up to a clear, migraine-free head, and decided to go for a run.  Admittedly, such strenuous exercise was a bit premature, but with the help of some extra strength Advil I managed to make it through the rest of the day.  Steve and I headed downtown and had a delectable lunch at Chien Noir.  We then wandered around for a bit, hitting up all our favourite shops and savouring the warm sunshine.  All this meant that we arrived home a little too late to prepare the easy, leisurely dinner party we had been hoping for.  A cobb salad and onion soup seemed like the perfect combination (it's soup and salad, how hard can it possibly be???)

Apparently, pretty hard.  Or at least time consuming.

So time consuming, in fact, that 7:30 came and we hadn't even started making the soup.  If we were in Europe, that wouldn't have seemed so weird.  But since we're in North America, most guests expect that the very latest time you can possible eat supper is eight o'clock.  Thus we ended up scrapping the soup idea, and throwing together some quick bruschetta to go with the salad instead.  

As it turned out, the cobb salad was more than enough by itself.  It's substantial salad, full of protein, and everyone was full by the end of the meal.  Here's the recipe, taken from our Williams Sonoma cookbook.  

For dessert, I made Madeleines (Martha Stewart's recipe).  Again, I apologize for the amateur photos.

Cobb Salad:

Ingredients:

3 hard boiled eggs 2 avocados, peeled & diced

8 slices bacon 2 tomatoes, chopped

1 head romain 1/4 lb + 1 oz crumbled Roquefort cheese

2 tbsps minced flat-leaf parsley 1/4 cup red wine vinegar

2 tbsps minced fresh chives 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce

2 cups watercress 1/2 tsp Dijon mustard

4 cups diced turkey or chicken 1 clove garlic, minced

S&P

1/3 cup EVOO

Cook chicken and bacon.

Make bed of lettuce in shallow bowl.  Mix parsley and chives.  Arrange eggs, bacon, herbs, watercress, turkey, avocados, tomatoes, and 1/4 lb cheese in pattern atop bed of romaine.

Whisk together vinegar, Worst. sauce, mustard, garlic, 1/4 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp pepper.  Mash in remaining 1 oz cheese.  Slowly drizzle in oil to form thick dressing.

Pour dressing over salad.

Madeleines:

Ingredients:

4 eggs

1/4 tsp salt

2/3 cup sugar

1 tsp vanilla

1 cup flour

1 stick butter (melted & cooled)

Beat eggs, salt, and sugar until thick (about 8 minutes).  Add vanilla.  Fold in flour.  Fold in butter.  Spoon mixture into madeleine pans.  Bake at 350 until golden, about 10 minutes.  Cool on racks.  Dust with powered sugar if desired.