On Pictures

I've been cooking a lot lately, but the grant writing whirl has kept me from posting. I've taken lots of pictures, so here's a mini post with lots of photos:

(Excuse how horrid they are - I am still learning the camera, and I'm too lazy to really "fix" any of them with photoshop right now.)

Photos of antipasti from the party we had to celebrate the limoncello:


Mozzarella balls from Whole Foods - sweet and nutty


Olives with mustard seed


Pepperocini


Fromage Fort - not Italian, but close enough - it's a mix of hunks of leftover cheeses with white wine, garlic, salt and pepper. This one is mostly goat and bleu cheese, with some dry vermouth. It got good reviews.


Crackers and Sopressata

So, I didn't make any of my antipasti, except the fromage fort, but they were all so very pretty (despite my shoddy camera work), I wanted to share.

Here's the cake I made as a late birthday surprise for John:








It's a yellow cake with lemon curd filling and buttercream icing, as he had requested some weeks before his birthday, and which wasn't able to get done before this party. The cake and icing and curd were all very easy to make, but the day was so warm and humid that they did not want to stay together. I called my mother, very upset that, despite the fact that I can make a layer cake, have done so before, and did everything in my power short of using a dowel to keep this one together, including digging a trough for the curd, it would not stay together. She calmed me down, and reminded me that everything looks fine once it's cut - and sure enough, an hour in the fridge later, the cake cut beautifully, and the guests would have been none the wiser had I not entertained them with the saga.

We actually made two batches of the first round of limoncello, one large batch that steeped with the simple syrup in the freezer, and a very small batch that steeped with the simple syrup outside of the freezer. The small batch was much smoother and thinner than the first, and a little more drinkable, but the colors were wildly different:


Small batch steeped with sugar on the left, original on the right


I also made some new recipes recently. One was this recipe for chicken schnitzel from the NYTimes. I made the salad they suggest, too, and have been making herby salads ever since. I steamed some asparagus along the side:












Finally, a picture of our dinner tonight, made by John, from scratch. He has a favorite pizza dough recipe, and he sliced some mushrooms and some Japanese eggplants (fresh from the farmer's market) very thin. He salted the eggplant for a little while before cooking, then loaded the dough with the mushrooms, the eggplant and sliced garlic atop tomato sauce and mozzarella. It was delicious - the picture does not do it justice.