Food Minia

I hope that those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving had a wonderful time last Thursday—we certainly did. My parents were visiting from France, and we prepared our first ever traditional Thanksgiving dinner together. We usually jump on the occasion of a 4-day weekend to travel around the US, but staying home with family and cooking all day was actually quite enjoyable (as always!). We prepared no fewer than 8 dishes from scratch, using recipes we had never tried before, with lots of unfamiliar ingredients and techniques. Quite a challenge... But everything turned out great. Before I forget, let me write down what we cooked. This will come in handy a year from now... Or sooner... We started with dessert, using this butternut squash pie recipe from High Ground Organics farm , but with orange kabocha squash, heavy whipping cream, and this pie crust . I had roasted the squash and taken a ball of pie dough out of the freezer the night before, and was ready to go in the morning. Before lu...

It was last weekend, a few days after la Chandeleur , the French "crepe day." I had made the batter around 4pm on Saturday, thinking that we would have the crepes for dinner that evening. Since the batter needs a couple hours of rest at room temperature, I left it on the kitchen counter while we visited our new friends, a family we met through preschool. But kids and parents alike had such a good time that we decided to end the day at the restaurant all together. I figured that the crepes could wait another day. On the way back from dinner, I put the bowl of batter in the fridge until Sunday's lunch. And what a lunch we had! Making crepes is a bit like making jam, as far as I'm concerned: as simple as the recipe might be, something always goes wrong, and I never know what it is. Crepes end up being too thick, jam overcooks... It's an art much more than it is a science. Successes always seem like miracles.  On Saturday, although I always prepare the batter with a w...