The Wonderful World of Crostini

I first discovered tapenade, a spread made from olives and capers, when my uncle hosted an evening based on The Big Night more than a decade ago.  It was only fitting, then, that when a party was thrown to celebrate that same uncle’s 60th birthday, that Cari and I should provide tapenade and some other delicious spreads for the occasion.

All three of the spreads we made turned out well and were served as part of a crostini bar which guests could help themselves to.

I’ll start by sharing the most complicated of the bunch.  Emeril Lagasse’s recipe for Olive Tapenade.  We made the mistake of buying black olives with their pits, which only further added to the complications.  We also didn’t use anywhere close to the amount of capers called for, but it still turned out well.

Recipes:

Pesto and Goat Cheese Macaroni and Cheese

We love pesto.
We love goat cheese.
We love macaroni & cheese.
Enough said.

We had our friend Matt over for brunch on Sunday and after finishing our bagels and flipping through some of our favourite cookbooks, we all decided we’d like to spend the afternoon cooking together.  We debated everything from bear claws and doughnuts to cakes and pies before finally settling on simple dishes done up gourmet style.  This eventually evolved into the concept of cooking a whole bunch of food and taking it over to Rick & Carina’s apartment for dinner.

We baked chocolate chip cookies with a bit of dried fruit mixed in, made hamburgers with extra old cheddar and poblano peppers mixed in the actual ground meat mixture, and topped it all with this intensely flavoured macaroni and cheese dish.

This dish is indulgent.  It has 1 3/4 cups of parmigiano-reggiano, 2 cups of heavy cream, 16 ounces of goat cheese and 1/2 cup of pesto.  Will we make it again?  Of course!

The Best Banana Bread EVER

This is one of those recipes that has been in our repertoire since long before we started this blog, and somehow we never got around to posting it. I vaguely remember a time before this recipe came along… when we made a few mediocre banana breads, never finding anything quite right. Then we made this one. So so so good. Wonderfully moist and flavourful, and just yummy. If you have any browning bananas on hand, go and make this right now. Today. You won’t regret it.

Limoncello Cheesecake Squares

It’s been nearly a month since we’ve blogged. Easily the longest without posting we’ve gone. We’ve been a bit… unmotivated lately. Felt a bit like we just recycling through our favourite cookbooks, and while we were posting some tasty dishes, it just didn’t seem as inspiring.

Well, we’re back, and we have a goal of cooking some tasty and unique dishes over the next few weeks.  But first, we thought we’d share a few things we made for Adam’s uncle George’s 60th birthday party. I can assure you that this recipe is worthy of being our first in nearly a month: Limoncello Cheesecake Squares. One of George’s friends made a point of thanking us personally and said it was as good as anything he’d had at a restaurant. Then again, he also called Adam’s mom’s biscotti “sex on a plate” – so maybe he was just enthusiastic about all things food (not to suggest her biscotti wasn’t awesome – it was!)