December is National Pear Month: Pear Lunch at Castagna

By mlb, on December 3rd, 2011%

I recently had the very good fortune of being invited to a festive Pear Lunch hosted by Pear Bureau Northwest at Castagna Restaurant. This was completely awesome for a number of reasons, including I got to leave work early for a long lunch and Castagna is practically in my neighborhood, so jwa and I could just walk there. And although we go to Cafe Castagna pretty frequently, it’s been a while (a couple of years?) since we’ve been to the restaurant side. So that was very nice too.

I took some photos of the lunch and at the time, I was pleased to not be the only one photographing my food. Seriously, everyone had a camera and/or iphone out and was snapping pics before trying anything. I was quite amused.

I missed a photo of the pear juice flight but I have two images of the champagne cocktail (sparkling wine cocktail? Sometimes when someone hands me a glass, I forget to remember what it is…) we were greeted with at the door, so I think it all evens out.

First up: Comice Pear with Granola and Yogurt. Sounds so simple . . . → Read More: December is National Pear Month: Pear Lunch at Castagna

FFwD: Matafan (Fluffy Mashed Potato Pancakes)

By mlb, on December 1st, 2011%

Okay, so I almost forgot about this French Fridays with Dorie but I’m glad I didn’t, this was a very interesting FFwD experiment. I made a number of changes, mainly because I wanted to work with what I had on hand. Here’s how that went:

1. First off, I made a half recipe, so I had one potato that was about 3/4 of a pound.
2. I used a…sweet potato! I know, it’s probably not a real matafan then, but I had about 5 red potatoes (which I figured wouldn’t work at all) and 1 perfectly sized sweet potato. So, there you go. I used that.
3. I added about 1/2 tsp curry powder to the batter.
4. I went ahead and still oven roasted the potato on the bed of salt. I’m not sure it had the same effect, but is seemed interesting.
5. Strangely, I thought the sweet potato and curry powder combination tasted like pumpkin pie.

Here’s a link to everyone’s FFwD posts this week.