morsels & sauces

  For Christmas Eve dinner, I make morsels and sauces, which as you know, is my favorite kind of eating. I head out with the husband to procure raspberries, chocolate-covered almonds, brillat-savarin cheese , assorted meats, olives, and marinated mushrooms. I pop open a bottle of champagne. Then we settle in for the annual showing of It's a Wonderful Life or Rudolph . This year, I added these crostini to the buffet.  Bitter, savory, and salty, they were a delightful addition. The warm bean mixture gets a bit of a kick from the red pepper flakes; the thyme and bay leaf lend a savoriness and a depth to this base for building a tower of goodies atop toast. The radicchio needed a tad more sugar than I put in it (so I added a little more to the recipe below--the kind folks at Sunday Suppers  call for 1/2 teaspoon. I called for 1 teaspoon, and added the step of tasting the radicchio to be certain on your sugar content). And the bacon is just gilding the lily. ...

Guess what we'll be having for appetizers Thanksgiving Day. We gave these morsels a spin the other night as a precursor to the husband's birthday dinner, and whoo boy, these are tasty little numbers. Tasty enough to trot out in front of family and friends for Thanksgiving Dinner. Last year, about this time , I picked up Sunday Suppers , a fantastically photographed menu-based cookbook. It has been a delightful cookbook that has not steered me wrong, so I should have had faith that these would need to have more than a supporting role in a dinner at home. I am a reborn believer in this book. In the pear. In the pear cooked in butter and sugar and sprinkled with fried thyme leaves. Seriously, what about that doesn't sound like perfection? The crostini are as simple as can be, and we agreed that warm or cold, the pears are the stars.  Warm, they lend more of a savory quality to the crostini. Cold, the sweetness really stands at attention. Further, I love me a s...

So, the husband turned a prime number in age. We have been meaning to go out for prime rib* in celebration, but life seems to have other plans for us. As in many, big other plans. Those plans include an impromptu trip back to Salt Lake City (a story for another day) and the preparation for a trip to Illinois to see the family. However, to celebrate the husband's entrance into the prime of his life (or at least a year of it), I made him a birthday breakfast, which featured these lovely biscuits. * I am not a huge fan of prime rib, but I am willing to at least go to a steakhouse in honor of entering a prime number year and order a hell of a salad.  These are the sacrifices one makes for marriage. Last month, I happened upon this cookbook while wandering the lovely Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino,  and I snapped it up. While Karen Mordechai and (what seems like delightful) company present a whole host of lovely menus in honor of the spur-of-the-moment gathering of s...