10.20.2010

There is something pleasingly symmetrical about today's date.  Might be a good day to get a lottery ticket.

Last weekend was all about food.  I made two things that I thought were pretty splendid (three if you count the pear upside down cake).  The first was a seafood potpie from Ina Garten.  The second was a fall fruit salad.

There are no pictures of the pot pie.  We were hungry and it was too dark to take pictures anyway.  As I tend to do I made some adjustments to Ina's recipe.  First of all her recipe calls for lobster.  I made it with three different types of seafood instead.  I also used puff pastry for the crust rather than making my own and it worked perfectly.  I'll make it again and photograph it for posterity.  When I do I'll post my exact version of her recipe. 

The other thing I made was a Fall fruit salad.  I made it with pears, Honey Crisp apples (Is it just me or are the Honey Crisp apples HUGE this year?), plums, dried cranberries and diced cheddar cheese (any kind of cheese works – I've done it with blue cheese too).  I was going to put walnuts on it but when I opened the bag I did it a bit zealously and bag ripped open and the walnuts went flying into the adjoining room. 

What made it really good was I drizzled a little bit of flavored balsamic vinegar on it.  I used ripe peach balsamic from Marisolio.  It adds a nice sparkliness to the salad and it keeps the cut fruit from browning too.  I used the peach because it's what I had opened but I think the fig or cinnamon pear would be nice too.