Filling in the Gaps

When I test a recipe, if I don’t write about it immediately, you can be assured it just doesn’t get done. So I have lots of photos with no words to go with them and my blog has lots of gaps between posts. Always seems such a shame, to waste the photos,, so I thought I would show you some pictures of what I’ve been up to in the kitchen, without much prose to accompany them.

First are some French macarons that I made in February. They came out disappointingly flat, but they were tasty.


Last weekend Butcher Son asked me to make an ice cream cake. Now this is strange. He rarely asks me to make anything in the dessert category, and secondly, he is allergic to milk. While he is able to now tolerate small amounts of dairy on occasion, it is the last thing I thought he would ever ask for. When I queried him about the type of cake, he said chocolate with vanilla ice cream. Rather boring, I thought. So Brilliant Daughter made the chocolate layers (cake mix or brownie mix works fine), and I assembled the cake. (Cake layer, ice cream, mini chocolate chips, Hersheys syrup, cake layer, two layers of Hersheys syrup, and almond crunch.) As you can see, I did sneak in some mini chocolate chips in the ice cream and sprinkled the top with leftover almond crunch that I had made for some biscotti. It was actually quite good and significantly cheaper than anything you would buy at a specialty store. (My cost - about $5-6.)



I had a yen for mushrooms in March, and decided on a mushroom lasagne. I bought 4 different kinds of mushrooms at the greengrocer (including those two huge ones below), along with fresh whole milk ricotta, fresh mozzarella perlini and yes, fresh lasagne noodles. I chopped up the mushrooms and roasted them with some of my homemade herb salt, pepper mix, fresh herbs and olive oil. Once they were done, I layered the pasta and mushrooms with the perlini and the ricotta (to which I had added some fresh herbs, shredded parmesan cheese, 1 egg, salt and pepper). Baked it for 30 minutes and thoroughly enjoyed it…for days.

And last, but not least, Brilliant Daughter’s lemon meringue pie. She made this for Mr. B’s 50th birthday, on request.