Naked Chef Part III

We actually had this dinner last Thursday, but in all the excitement of Caelan's first step another post about what we had for dinner simply took the back burner.  Well that and I wasn't sure how much really wanted to hear about it?!

Darcy refused to make a selection.  She argued there was 'absolutely nothing that appealed in the entire book'.  Well, I decided to make a selection on her behalf!

Our version of the cauliflower macaroni, belgian endive salad with insane dressing and lovely stewed fruit:



The recipe said that you could use radicchio if you couldn't find red endive.  Unfortunately we've all decided that we're not big fans of large quantities of belgian endive or radicchio!  The salad dressing was pretty good though (and it had anchovies in it!)  The recipe called for creme fraiche in the macaroni and it was the first time I ever used that.  I think in this recipe you could fairly easily substitute sour cream and it would be half the price!  I didn't put the capers in the salad dressing, and I substituted bacon for the pancetta in the macaroni... I can't remember how many other switches I made.  There really weren't that many and for the most part it was more because things were just getting expensive with all the new and unusual ingredients on our grocery list.  I won't be trying three new recipes this week - we could never afford it!!  There are still so many more recipes I want to try out of this book but I'll just have to space them out a little so we don't break the budget completely!

Oh and I almost forgot the stewed fruit!  What an easy and delicious dessert!  No picture of our dessert; once again we gobble those up before I even think about getting the camera!!