For my contribution to our Christmas dinner, I wanted to try something new.  Everyone says this is a bad idea when cooking for guests, but I say it’s only a bad idea if you’re wimp.  I wanted to try a savory bread pudding.

It took some explaining to my family, because everyone kept thinking of sweet bread pudding, and thought my idea sounded gross.  How wrong they are!  Basically, savory bread pudding is like making stuffing.  Bread, vegetables, spices.  The additions that make it a “pudding” are the milk and egg “custard.”

I used this recipe from Cooking Light  for Mushroom, Roasted Red Pepper, and Goat Cheese Savory Bread Pudding.  as a guide, basically because other recipes I found were loaded with cream and butter and tons of eggs, which probably taste amazing, but I wanted to keep this light.   I kept the main ingredients the same, but changed the method a tiny bit.

I see no need to use jarred roasted red peppers.  They take no time to make either on the stove or in the oven, and are way cheaper.  So I used 2 red bell peppers that I roasted myself in this recipe.  I used a mixture of different mushrooms, left out the leeks in favor of sweet onions, used egg whites instead of egg substitute, and used this amazingly salty and pungent goat feta in place of the regular crumbled goat cheese.  Delicious.

I also made homemade peppermint patties while I was home.  Really, I had nothing to do during the day, can you tell??

The recipe I used is here and it was really simple and really delicious.  Here are the main ingredients:

Pretty straight forward, eh?

Here are my tips for making these: after you make the inside filling, refrigerate it for a few minutes.  Then form them into  ”pucks” by rolling into small balls and flattening, and then put them on a tray and place in the freezer to firm up for a bit.  Meanwhile, melt the chocolate and allow it to cool quite a bit before you dip the pucks in it.  Otherwise, the filling tends to melt.

My only complaint with these is that they need to be refrigerated to stay together.  I wanted to give them as gifts but once left out they were way too soft.

I used the same method as the peppermint patties to make homemade mounds bars and almond joys.  Just leave out the peppermint extract, and add in some flaked coconut to the filling.  Just eyeball it until the dough comes together.  Use the exact same method for refrigerating and forming the pucks, but make them more like little logs to mimic the real thing.  For the almond joy-ish treats, I simply pressed a whole almond into the top of the chocolate.

Really fun to make, simple ingredients that you probably already have in your cupboard.  If you have a spare hour to kill, I recommend giving these a try.

The Spinach linguine that I picked up at the Farmers Market made for an awesomely light dinner.

I made a very simple sauce of lemon juice and zest, garlic, olive oil, red bell pepper, and sun-dried tomatoes.

Ingredients

The sauce came together in minutes!  It was one of the easiest and most flavorful dishes I have made in quite some time.  You could really taste all of the individual flavors, including the pasta!

Artisan Pasta with Sun-dried Tomatoes and Lemon

[I admit, my pasta plating needs work if I'm going to be taking pictures.]

Usually flavored pastas taste like regular pasta to me, just with a different color–but this pasta was awesome!  It is certainly more expensive than traditional store-bought pasta, but with flavor this good, I’ll definitely be back for some more next weekend.

I had a glass of this Beaujolais with dinner, but it was just ok, I probably wouldn’t buy it again.  It was cheap though