GCC: Menu 13 - French Onion Soup and Spinach, Pear and Endive Salad

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This is the last menu of the year for the Gutsy Cook Club.  So far we have done 29 dishes making up 13 menus.  The Gutsy cooks have been tremendous in their participation.  The diversified menu chosen by the last 3 home chefs have given each of us the opportunity of cooking things we love, tasting new ingredients and techniques, and trying new things, some of which have pushed their comfort zone.  I could not have been more proud to cook along with such a great group.  One, which I know will continue to grow and get gutsier as we work our way thru the Kitchen Bible Cookbook.

When I started this cook-along club, my main goal was to meet other home chefs that were willing to ride along with me and have fun and share our twist and turns of the whisk.  I say we have done well for 2010 and I’m looking forward to the New Year, with such great menus in the horizon I know we will continue to have a blast.

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HCB: Chocolate Streusel Coffee Cake (Free Choice)

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I think this is the first cake that I make using my “Free Choice” pass with the Heavenly Cake baker group.  

While most of my fellow bakers are at the 70+ cake mark, I believe, I have only done about thirty-seven of them (hard to keep track), so as you can see I need to SERIOUSLY play catch up.

And our organizer, Marie has giving us a free choice each month to do just that.  While some of my fellow bakers have taking this and baked not, one, but two cakes during their free choice, I have totally and completely taken the high road to slothfulness and even sat there to deliberate which cake to do, and eventually gave up on myself and just not do a thing. *hanging head in shame*.

But this weekend, I was NOT GOING TO let my LAZY side win.  I was going to do a cake, come hell or high water.

I just needed to choose an easy one.

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GCC: Menu 12 - Pork Chops with Blue Cheese Stuffing, Warm Green Salad and Potato Herb Galette

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How late is this post?

2 days late.  This was supposed to post this past Sunday.  But, well, I been a bit busy, celebrating my birthday for the past 3 days. Yes, folk, over at my house we celebrate birthdays for days - not for A DAY, but FOR DAYS.  This way we get the maximum celebratory moments in there.  Plus this year, my birthday fell on a weekday – and not any weekday, but Monday.  How much do we hate Mondays? We hate it much. And a birthday day? Even more, so we needed to balance it out and maximize it.

And in order to do that, I decided take the day off on Monday, and made it into a long weekend and to basically run with the flow, which was let Tom pamper me silly.  So he did most of the cooking this past weekend.  That is why the Gutsy Cook menu of the week did not even get done until Sunday for a quick lunch.  And the only thing I did was the Pork Chops with the Blue Cheese stuffing.  The green bean salad and the potato herb galette fell of the list.  Ok, a potato gratin took it’s place, which had nothing to do with the original menu - but it’s so good I now you guys will forgive me.

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