Thanksgiving

For our Thanksgiving dinner, I made a baked, stuffed pumpkin. Not strictly speaking, an Around the World dinner, but I took the recipe from "Around My French Table" by Dorie Greenspan. I don't have the cookbook but the pumpkin recipe was featured when NPR interviewed Greenspan and is also on Amazon. M wasn't a huge fan but Steve and I loved it. Steve confessed later that he had been skeptical and was pleasantly surprised. Love to have my cooking be a source of a pleasant surprise! :)

I followed the recipe as given on Amazon, but with the following changes:
* I left out the bacon.
* I used pumpernickel and Gruyere for the bread and cheese.
* My pumpkin was smaller than the one in the recipe (2 lbs, rather than 3 lbs), so I only baked it for 1 hour, 20 minutes.

Preview to Series 2

This is M. I am here to tell you about Around the World Dinners Series 2. We'll repeat some dinners we've already made, but we also will have some new dinners. Series 2 begins on the continent of Africa. Some Series 2 posts will be from me, while others won't have as much from me.

In the dinners we are repeating there will be exciting new content. We are hoping that our first blog post will be released on November 27th. We hope you liked Series 1, and you will certainly love Series 2.

Mom's Addition

We took a break while on our other adventure. But we're excited to be back working on Around the World dinners. Yesterday, Amazon had a bunch of ethnic cookbooks available for free for the Kindle and I downloaded lots of delish recipes. I am especially excited to try out recipes from "Nile Style" and to share our French-inspired Thanksgiving main course.

Late Post: Viet Nam

We followed our New Year's dinner with a Vietnamese dinner on Jan 2nd. All of the recipes we used were from the cookbook "Cafe Viet Nam," which we borrowed from the library. We made:

* vegetable spring rolls
* fish congee
* coconut creme brulee

While everything was good, I didn't feel like any of it was outstanding. The fish congee was similar to, but not as tasty as our earlier Thai Rice Soup (which we have since made a second time and still loved!).


M's Interruption
The spring rolls were good but the crunchy shells are not as good as soft shells (as you will see if you try making them). The coconut creme brulee was good but not the best dessert ever.


Back to Mom
Good remembering, M. Yes, some of our spring rolls turned out crunchier than we had planned.

Tonight we making pupusas and curtido from El Salvador. After reading Rick Steves' recent post about his trip to San Salvador and, particularly about dining at a pupuseria near his hotel, I am excited to try making pupusas -- and we'll try not to wait a month to write about this one! :)

Late Post: Happy New Year 2011!

Yep, we're just getting around to writing our posts about meals we made the first week of January. Where did the last month go??

For New Year's Day we made hoppin' john, collards (using the recipe at my favorite food blog Cook for Good), and German chocolate cake. All were yummy!

M says
The German chocolate cake was one of the best desserts I've ever eaten! Try it!