Dessert-ed

Monday snuck up on me this week.  It does that sometimes.  Therefore, this morning found me searching the archives at cooks.com for some good dinner ideas.  I had to find something quick, because we all know I had only a small window of grocery shopping opportunity before the appearance of “the hulk” in both children.  I found a chicken dinner that sounded good - because apparently I am a one note wonder when it comes to food - and pulled out a salad recipe I’d stashed a while back.  Done and done.  Yesterday I had come up with what I believed to be a brilliant idea for dessert, so no recipe needed.

So, dinner was Saltimbocca, found here.  It involved chicken, prosciutto (which apparently I can’t pronounce), and monterey jack cheese with a yummy creamy mushroom sauce.  It was delish - although I became convinced at dinner that something is wrong with the salt I bought last week.  After ruining the hot dogs from monday food fest, and now nearly rendering our saltimbocca inedible, I’ve decided to never buy sea salt from Aldi again.  (Sorry, Aldi, no offense.)  Luckily, the flavor wasn’t completely ruined - and my mom requested a repeat.

As I was gathering ingredients for the salad, I realized it was almost identical to THIS salad that I had already made up earlier.  I decided to try it out anyway, because there were some subtle differences, including directions for making my own lemon poppyseed dressing, and because I had no other new ideas for a side.

I started making the salad, then realized I had NO lemon juice, because I’d forgotten it (even thought it was on my list) (sometimes I wonder what good lists are anyway?).  So I took a chance and improvised, and I have to say, it worked out really well (surprisingly).  So I’ve included the salad recipe here with my changes.

Lemonade Salad

One head of Leaf Lettuce

1 apple (I used jonagold)

1 pear (I used bartlett)

1/2 cup or so of dried cranberries

1/2 cup or so cashews

a bunch of swiss cheese (like 4-8 oz), grated

DRESSING:

1/2 C. sugar

1/4 C. lemonade

1/4 C. lime juice
1 tsp. dijon mustard
2 tsp. chopped dried onions

1 tsp. salt

3/4 C. veggie oil

1 tblsp. poppyseeds

Rip up the lettuce into a bowl.  Core and cut up the apple and pear into small pieces - add to bowl.  Add the cranberries, cashews and cheese.  Blend the sugar, lemonade, lime juice, mustard, dried onions and salt in the blender until mixed well.  Add the oil while still blending, in a slow, continuous pour.  Add the poppyseeds and blend just a touch more.  Just prior to serving, pour over salad and toss.

It was great!  I guess using lemonade isn’t such a novel idea, but I really liked the flavor, so I thought I’d share.

I think this may be the first time I've liked both the main dish and the side BETTER than the dessert.  (er, well, better than the original dessert).

Because here is the BIG NEWS of the night.  Are you ready?  I had my very first ever dessert fail.  It all started with inspiration from Alicia at A Beautiful Mess.  Last week she made s’mores on a stick.  Such a cute idea!  I thought I’d go with this theme, but I wanted to make the marshmallow part a little more special, you know?  So I thought maybe I could somehow combine marshmallows and a cream-cheesey-chesse-cake type filling.  Then I’d poor this into little baby food jars, stick in a “cookie stick”  (you know those oreo stix?) chill it until set up, dip it in melted chocolate, cover this in graham cracker crumbs and yummo!  Right?  Maybe you all know what I didn’t know and are already thinking what a horrible idea this is.  I got this far:

I tried to remove the marshmallowy stuff from the wax paper coated jars.  Didn’t work well.  I spooned some up, just to test it.  Oh.my.gosh.  It was the atrocious consistency of phlegm, you know, when you have a cold, and it’s all gross and mucousy?  There was no way I could choke this down.  Ever.  

So THIS is what we actually ate for dessert:

And it was good.  mini is an ice cream junkie.

I’m hoping to make these cream cheese s’mores on a stick into a popsicle type item, so the consistency will just be FROZEN - which I could handle.  I’ll give you an update on how it goes later.  In any case, I’m adding it to the scoreboard over there because I can’t call this anything else but a miserable failure.  I’ll own up.  I’ll take responsibility.  I’m determined to beat this thing.


And thanks, DQ.

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