Five Pounds (mostly butter fat.)

Is how much weight I probably gained this weekend. Good Lord. We have been doing some professional eating up in here. We started off Friday night after work heading over to The Railyard for a send off party for one of my co-workers Shayna and her husband Jack who left today to move to Austin, Texas. Most all of the peeps I work with were there (we were missing Beth and Kate.) I ate mushroom gnocchi with truffle oil (ummm and some onion rings.) Very filling and pretty good.

Here's a shot (albeit a bad shot) of the group at the table....



I had a table mate named Quinn... he is the owner's (Jeff and Kari) little guy. We got along just fine. I cheered him on while he was concocting crayon cocktails. And he helped me demolish the onion ring appetizer.


I'll miss Shayna... she was such a great help training me as a chocolatier. Bon Voyage sister! Good luck in Texas!

Saturday is of course the farmer's market and so we went and loaded up on good stuff again. And we have been cooking our asses off and fattening our asses up ever since. Yesterday we made a tomato and corn pie. What could be more perfect this time of the year? The recipe is from Smitten Kitchen's blog. It was fun to make and turned out really delicious. I would totally make it again.







After we pigged out on that pie I made a cold dessert soup from this month's Vegetarian Times magazine that is a coconut milk base with tapioca and fresh honeydew melon. Dudes. It was mighty fine... and again, really pretty food.





Sheesh. We went to bed full last night. Billy claimed to still be full when he woke up this morning (not me, I am apparently a pig.)

So we polished off the rest of that tomato pie today with a nice simple salad of peppery arugula from the market. Yes, we ate a whole pie between the two of us in exactly 24 hours. Sick. And here's where it gets really good... Billy bought these sweet little tiny pears at the market Saturday with the plan of baking them in a tart. People... what a tart it turned out to be. Allow me to demonstrate...

See how cute those little pears are nestled in to their tart pan?

Little pears... meet your new friends shortbread crust and almond cream filling.



After baking for an hour...



To make matters even worse he poured on a honey-pear glaze...




Digging in...



Uhhhh, yeah.

So there you have it. The five pounds. Billy was making the argument tonight that Julia Child lived to be in her 90's eating this sort of shit her whole life long. She was also like 12 feet tall and a giant of a kick ass woman. I'm 5'2 and kind of a dweeby, sickly kid. I haven't got a chance. Billy has been wielding a stick of butter a day ever since he got hooked on French cooking. Wish me luck.

Ok... so in closing here are a few more random pics from the past few days hanging out at home. Have a great week y'all!

This one goes out to Karen... Rudy in his sexiest pose....

This is a shot from a moment when cheddar cheese was being shredded for the tomato pie.

Market flowers.

Rudy at his usual post... growling at the world at large. Too bad we are on the second floor and no one out in the world cares.