Leftover green beans make a beautiful salad

What to do with a handful of leftover cooked green beans? These beans had been steamed to almost tender, then sauteed in a little bacon fat along with some sliced onions. Starting with chilled beans, I tossed them with a bottled Provencal vinaigrette, topped with some diced roasted red bell pepper, garnished with yellow pear tomato halves (from my own garden!) and a few shavings of pecorino romano cheese. Although I plated the salad on small (6 inch) plates, it would have been just as pretty on a larger platter.

coming soon...pictures!

OK, I'm joining the 21st Century. I got a Droid cell phone today that actually takes decent pictures. The next time I make a blog-worthy dish, I take a photo of it!

Do you like fancy desserts?

I am convinced that many wonderful things happen because something didn't initially work out right.

I made flan for dessert the other night (for guests), in small 1/2 cup ramekins and they really did shrink more than I thought they would. So I started thinking about how I could give them some height. In the freezer, I had a genoise round cake layer I had made a few weeks ago and ended up not using. I had split it horizontally so I had two thin layers. Genoise is an incredibly simple sponge-type cake. It isn't super sweet and tends toward dryness--in Europe it is the foundation for many wonderful desserts as it is typically brushed with some kind of syrup. This got me thinking: what if I took some liqueur, flamed off the alcohol and brushed that on little rounds of the genoise. Then placed the genoise on top of the ramekin before flipping it onto a dessert plate. The result would be a half-inch thick round of cake topped with a silky round of flan, with of course, the caramel shimmering on the top. I tried Chambourd raspberry liqueur and then tried Amaretto. Both were good--so I combined them! It needed something else, so I took a peach, a fresh apricot and a fresh plum (all local--from a Fredericksburg farmer I buy eggs from) and finely diced them. I let them macerate in a bit of the liqueur syrup. At serving time, I topped each flan with a nice mound of the diced fruit. Voila!