Marianna's Meal

Last Sunday Marianna and I spent much of the day making dinner. Cooking with kids in certainly time consuming! In fact, we count it as "special time", bonding with Mom.

Her menu included meatball soup, challah, and veggies and dip, with a fruit galette for dessert. We got most of the recipes from a library cookbook: There's a Chef in My World! by Emeril Lagasse. In the past we've had to adjust some of Emeril's recipes because he can be overly generous with sugar, salt, or fat, but these were all good.

The challah was delicious and beautiful. Marianna helped make the dough ropes (I finished them), and she did the braiding herself. The soup was very good but received mixed reviews--some really liked the meatballs while others preferred the broth/veggie part. Everyone enjoyed sprinkling on the parmesan cheese!

I was especially pleased with the fruit galette. It's a sort of free form pie. I had made one several years ago(different cookbook) that was TERRIBLE! The dough was blah, and the filling had almost no sugar, so the berries it was made with were SOUR. Marianna's pie took careful preparation but looked and tasted great. We used frozen peaches and canned cherries, so a lot of juice came out as baking began. I was sure the bottom would be swamped and soggy, so I took it out of the oven and spooned off as much as possible. I also ended up baking it significantly longer than the recipe suggested, but you can see that it did not overbrown. And the bottom was actually crispy. Yum! You can't tell from the picture, but it was baked (on parchment) on a pizza pan and is 10-11" in diameter--a good 10 servings or so.