David is still being attacked by some foul gastro-intestinal beast. He spent most of Thanksgiving dinner on his sister’s sofa. Sad for him, the dinner was delicious. Ryan and Julie did a straight up traditional dinner with the turkey, cornbread stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy and even green bean casserole! My contribuions were pumpkin cheesecake and figgy pear parnouti.
The cheesecake was the Cook’s Illustrated spiced pumpkin cheesecake with bourbon cream sauce. I love the Cook’s Illustrated recipes because not only are they amazingly detailed but they determine the common problems with a recipe and tackle them for you. The result was a very light, not too wet, not too dry, very tasty pumpkin cheesecake. I’m having a slice right now with the sauce.
Figgy pear parnouti was a recipe I made up based on other recipes I had researched:
5 red bartlett pears
1/2 pound dried Kalamata figs
1 cup toasted walnuts
4 ounces chevre
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 stick butter
1/3 cup water
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cardamom
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
Preheat oven to 425
Cut pears in half, cut each half into 3rds, remove cores.
quarter figs
toss pears, figs, and walnuts in a bowl and set aside.
Melt butter and sugar together, whisking constantly. Once it starts bubbling add the water and heat to boiling until the sugar dissolves. Mix in spices.
Dump sugar sauce over pear/fig/walnut mixture and stir to coat. Dump into casserole pan. Cut the corner off chevre wrapper and squeeze out little blobs to evenly dot the surface of the casserole. Bake for 20 minutes. Serve warm.
Variations:
1) use a reisling instead of water in the sugar sauce
2) use mirableu sheep’s milk blue cheese
Huzzah for figgy pear parnouti.
Hope you had a happy one my peeps.