Baked Alaska

I love Granola. I don't make it often though, because I quite simply eat too much of it when it is around. I eat it for breakfast. Usually sprinkled over yogurt. Sometimes a bowl of it with milk on top. Then, where I really go wrong is I tend to reach into that jar multiple times a day for a little snack. While it's a healthy item filled with fiber, vitamins, and minerals, because of all of the nuts it is quite high in calories.

But fall makes me think of Granola, and when I came across a recipe on David Lebovitz's blog a couple of weeks ago, I had to make it. His version was adapted from Feast, by Ngella Lawson, and I have adapted it a little more. I have my favorite granola recipe that contains oats, maple syrup, lots of different kinds of nuts and dried fruit. But I was intrigued by this recipe because it contained no dried fruit and one of the "wet" ingredients was applesauce. I thought the applesauce would not allow the granola to crisp up, but in fact, it does the opposite. This is a very crisp, crunchy granola full of good things like multi-grain flakes, almonds, sesame seeds and sunflower seeds. I gave my husband the warning about eating it in small doses, because of the high fat content of the nuts, but somehow, I haven't been heeding that warning. Well, I do eat it in small doses, one, after another, after another...

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I can't believe that we are already on Week 11 of Sunday Small Bites. Life just flies by a little too fast. This week, our ingredient was chosen by Palma. She chose ginger. I love ginger, but had trouble deciding what to make this week. While a lot of recipes contain ginger, I was looking for one that really featured ginger, not just had it as an ingredient.

I chose an interesting recipe called "Roasted Garlic Dipping Sauce with Fresh Ginger and Tamari. I'm sorry I can't name the source it came from. I did lots of google searches to find it, now can't seem to located it again. The sauce is meant to be served as a dipping sauce for bread, like you might serve olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

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I've been a little busy around here, and haven't been cooking a lot. When I'm busy, I tend to make a big pot of soup that we eat all week. That's what's been happening this week. But I sure wanted to participate in our Sunday Small Plates. This week's ingredient was chosen by Candi. She chose mushrooms as our ingredient. I looked through a lot of old recipes I had cut out. This one came from an old Bon Apetite magazine. I decided on it because I still have some of that puff pastry I made in the freezer. Probably only one more recipe to use it up after this. But back to the recipe. I chose Mushroom and Goat Cheese Tart. It was so good. As anyone who has read my blog knows, I love goat cheese. And I love it paired with mushrooms. Throw puff-pastry into the mix, and you can't go wrong. This is quick to make also.

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FIG, APRICOT, AND WALNUT TAPENADE

This week's ingredient for our Sunday Small Plates was chosen by Jerry. I love olives, but my husband doesn't like them. This was a good week to have olives as the ingredient, because he was out of town all week and I had a party to go to Friday night where I needed to bring an appetizer. I chose to make an olive tapenade. This recipe was unusual in that it also contained figs, apricots, prunes, and walnuts. To balance out all of that sweet, there was also capers and balsamic vinegar. The tapenade is not the most beautiful to look at, as you'll see from my photos. It's kind of a mess to look at. But it tastes delicious. I served it on crostini (bread drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt and pepper, then grilled until toasted). A layer of goat cheese is spread on the crostini, then it is topped with the tapenade. I followed the recipe as listed, except that I didn't want it as chunky, so I put about 3/4 of it in the food processor to grind it a bit, then stirred the last 1/4 of it into the other 3/4 to keep some of the chunk. (That was a really bad sentence, wasn't it?)

The recipe came from the website InnCuisine.com. I had never seen that site before. It came up during a google search for Olive Fig tapenade.

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It's almost the end of October, which means it's time to share our October Daring Bakers challenge. The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

I was so excited when I saw this, because I've always wanted to make French Macarons. I've read about how difficult they can be to make, so I had never attempted them. Until now. Oh yeah, for those of you who don't know what a French Macaron is, it's a cookie based on either ground almonds or almond paste, combined with sugar and egg whites. The texture can run from chewy, crunchy or a combination of the two. Frequently, two macaroons are sandwiched together with ganache, buttercream or jam, which can cause the cookies to become more chewy.

A lot of people said they were having trouble with the recipe we were to use for this challenge, so I decided to not only make the challenge recipe, but two others as well! I'll give you a brief overview of what I made, but I'll give more detailed posts later on the other recipes. Today I'll concentrate on our challenge recipe.

We were given Claudia Fleming's recipes for the macarons. We were required to use that recipe, but we were allowed to flavor them as we pleased, along with choosing any filling we wanted.

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