olson indy weekend

Having Nuno help in the kitchen on the weekend really makes it easy to knock off something greater than Everyday Food. During the week I can handle making dinner from Everyday Food recipes, but when we want something a little nicer for the weekend we can turn to Anna Olson's collection of recipes. There was so much cooking and baking from Anna's books going down this weekend, it may take me a few posts to get through them all.

This is Saturday night's dinner of Marinated Flank Steak Salad. Oh my gosh - delicious, delicious, delicious. That's all I can say. I love Anna Olson's creative salad ideas I honestly wonder if I'll ever make a regular green salad again. The dressing was so truly delicious despite subbing in fresh basil for the recommended tarragon and a white onion instead of red. It made so much I really look forward to keeping this dressing around for future salads.

The next morning I found Nuno working on Chocolate Griddle Cakes with Cinnamon Peaches. I know... I married the perfect man when he can bang out a recipe like this as a treat. And he nailed it! They tasted like brownies. But we noted that the griddle cakes are slightly bitter and require the cinnamon peach dressing. If you haven't jumped into buying peaches yet, they are totally ready and delicious. They remove from the stone perfectly, peel nicely, are super juicy and have the most gorgeous peach colour with deep red streaked through the flesh.

From Fresh, this is Icewine Sabayon with Summer Fruits. I think this might just be the most extravagant dessert I have ever made. Sounds rich and uses rich ingredients. Luckily, with Katie working at Inniskillin, there is always a bottle of ice wine available at my parents house. I used Inniskillin Riesling ice wine for this dessert. The fruit combination is all locally grown strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, peaches and apricots. This is one dessert I'd love to serve for out of town guests.

Since the sabayon took 6 egg yolks, the left over egg whites were used in a doubled a batch of Coconut Macaroons from Everyday Food. Macaroons are my favourite cookie and I have so many people giving me their 'best' macaroon recipe, but this one seemed golden because of it's simplicity. Yep, too simple for me to bake correctly, here is how they turned out:

What a disaster! Not a complete disaster though because they are actually quite tasty if not on the ugly side. But I have to wonder where I went wrong. I've read and re-read this recipe and am still baffled. It looks to me like I'll have to add quite a bit more coconut to this recipe in the future.