Carrot Ginger Soup, Onion Bread Pudding, Spinach Pear Salad

So, today was my first day cooking out of "THE BEST OF COOKING LIGHT". I made 3 recipes tonight... Spinach-Pear Salad, Carrot-Ginger Soup, and Onion Bread Pudding (a meatless main dish according to the cookbook category). Since I was just cooking for 2 of us, I cut all the recipes in half. Here are my comments on all of the recipes...

The SPINACH PEAR SALAD was my favorite...

This was super easy to make, and took less than 10 minutes from start to finish, including making the dressing. I made the dressing while the other dishes were cooking and let it rest to allow the flavors to blend. I thought it had too much dressing so when I plated the salad I didn't add the rest of the dressing from bowl. I loved the flavors of the pears when you ate them with the salad, and they went well with the dressing. But, the recipe was supposed to include red onion pieces and I forgot to add them at the end. Since I'm not a big fan of raw onions I was ok with forgetting them, but it make the recipe not 100% accurate. I would definitely  make this recipe again, and Brian like it as well.

The CARROT-GINGER SOUP, it was good, but a LOT of work...

This soup took an hour of prep work, and then an hour of simmer time, and then a few more minutes at the end to add the final ingredients and puree the soup. The thing I hated the most was having to make ginger juice from ginger root... a total pain... peel the ginger, dice it up, put it in the food processor with some water and puree it. Because it was such a small amount you had to keep stopping every couple pulses and scrape down the sides. Then once you got it pureed you had to put it in a cheesecloth and squeeze out the juices to get ginger juice. The results, however, were absolutely tremendous and the flavors were delicious. It was very good and we liked it quite a bit, but I'm not sure it was worth all the work and effort. But, I guess all good things come at a price, right?

ONION BREAD PUDDING, Brian's favorite...

This was a really easy recipe to make, it only took about 15 minutes of prep time and 25 minutes to bake.

I made these in 2 small individual pie dishes and thought the portions were still a little big, even though according to the recipe this amount would serve two. Brian ate all of his and I ate about two thirds of mine. I really liked the onion flavor on this and thought a little more onion on top would have been nicer. The onions were sweet onions so the flavor was really nice. And there was also some Gruyere cheese in it as well, which I really love. I would definitely make this again, and add a little more onion to it.

We also had some Beringer Chenin Blanc white wine with this meal. We are not wine connoisseurs by any means, and really don't know how to pair wines with our foods, but hopefully we'll learn a little bit. We can usually tell if it should be a red or white wine, but that's about as far as our expertise goes. When we go to our favorite Restaurant, the Black Bear Restaurant in Green Mountain Falls, we usually split a wine pairing with our Chef's Table and we love it when a good glass of wine compliments a meal, but we just don't know how to do that. This was probably the first time we actually 'guessed' right! The Chenin Blanc went perfectly with this meal, we were pleasantly surprised.

So, 3 recipes down, 544 more to go. Will be back tomorrow night with results from tomorrow's dinner.

Bon Appetit!