Happy Birthday Julia Child!

Bon Appetit!

Eileen, Prudy, and I celebrated Julia Child's 101st birthday last night on Eileen's deck with some French baguette sandwiches (sandwiches au jambon), some delicious French rosé,  and yummy French macarons. It wasn't exactly what we had planned, but hey, we roll with the punches. We have celebrated Julia's birthdays in the past with fancy French-themed dinner parties, lunches at French bistros, and a big week-long celebration at the Smithsonian last year for Julia's 100th birthday, complete with orchestra and birthday cake. Julia Child has been an inspiration to us all our adult lives, in her cooking and with her great spirit and big personality. We love our Julia Child.

Cookie Exchange 2012

Eileen, Prudy, and I had our annual cookie exchange on Friday night.  How is it possible we have been doing this for 28 years?? It's become one of our favorite Christmas traditions,  that we look forward to and talk about all year. Prudy hosted this year at her house, and she made the Silver Palate Chicken Marbella, rice, and sauteed spinach for our dinner, which was delicious. We had a great evening,  and love seeing each other's cookies and "presentations," complete with a few little gift items that we throw in. Our cookie exchange was the inspiration for our cookbook, which we made a few years ago, and ended up including all our favorite recipes, not just the cookies. But most of our cookie recipes are in the cookbook.

Cookies packed up

We have a lot of tried and true cookies that we make every year, but I think we each made a new cookie this year.  I made chocolate shortbread hearts, French sables, and a date and fig pinwheel cookie.  Prudy made rugelach, a sugar cookie with peppermint frosting, and a bourbon flavored snowflake cookie. Eileen made chocolate caramel thumbprints, a cranberry orange cookie, and a molasses cookie. After dinner, we sample all the cookies for our dessert. Another successful cookie exchange in 2012!

Containers are key

Sampling for dessert

Julia Child's Birthday at the Smithsonian

Julia's copper pot collection

Eileen, Prudy, and I had a little field trip yesterday to the Smithsonian's Museum of American History to celebrate Julia Child's 100th birthday. The exhibit featuring Julia's actual kitchen from her Cambridge, Mass. home, reopened on Wednesday after being closed for a year-- you can see Julia's pots and pans as she hung them from her pegboard walls, her handwritten labels on glass jars,  her food processors, her cookbooks, all her utensils, and knives. Her entire copper pot collection that she bought in Paris is on display. Episodes of her first television show, The French Chef, were running all day in the museum's theater. We sat and watched her make omelets (20 seconds!), pie crust, and roast chicken. There were book signings for a new biography about her, and several other Julia books.  This is restaurant week in DC, and lots of restaurants are having special Julia dinners, featuring her most-loved recipes. So great!

Peeking in Julia's kitchen

Julia's cookbooks

There was a "surprise" event at 1 pm, which turned out to be a band decked out in chef's jackets and toques playing music.  A huge cake was wheeled in and the crowd all sang "Happy Birthday" to Julia. We especially loved the conductor using a giant whisk.  As you can see many in the crowd were wearing chef's toques also.  So fun.

Conductor with giant whisk!

 Of course we had to have a little lunch afterwards (at Central), and some fancy desserts in honor of Julia. Yummo. Happy Birthday Julia. You inspire us.

Busy Girl

We got to have both our kids for dinner yesterday, as Julia was home just for the day. On Friday she flew to Charlottesville for the wedding of a friend, and had a great time seeing lots of old friends from UVA and visiting some of her favorite hangouts.  On Sunday morning she hitched a ride with a friend back to NoVa,  and spent the day with us, lying on the sofa watching the Olympics, relaxing,  and eating the first home cooked dinner she has had all summer! Brooks came over too and we had our favorite summer dinner of teriyaki pork chops, rice, Armenian Country Salad, and fresh corn. She flew out of Dulles this morning, back to Nashville,  for the last week of her internship, then will fly back to Atlanta for the weekend, and then back to Chapel Hill next week for her third (and final, yea!) year of graduate school. She has really enjoyed her internship this summer, but she seems pretty happy to be going back to school. Did I say it's her last year??? It sure was nice to see my girl.

Peach pie for Julia

Salad Sampler

Eileen (and her broken arm),  Prudy, and Dixie

Last night was our annual Salad Sampler dinner at Eileen's house. We had planned to have it at my house, but Eileen took a spill and broke her arm two weeks ago, so we all went to Eileen's instead to make it easier on her. I made a salade nicoise with shrimp, Dixie did a caprese salad of tomatoes and mozzarella, as well as a black bean and fresh corn salad, and Prudy made Nora's peach pie. I wonder how many of Nora Ephron's peach pies have been made in the past month?  I can't remember when we started doing our salad samplers--many, many years ago, but we always look forward to it and it's fun to make our salads with all the best fresh veggies from the farmer's market. Of course we walked around and admired Eileen's garden--it was fun to see the plants we all buy together up in Lancaster County. Her gardens look great, lots of cool things to look at.

Salade Nicoise

Caprese Salad

Nora's Peach Pie, of course

Nora Ephron's Peach Pie

Image via Pinterest

I made Nora Ephron's peach pie this weekend in her honor. Heartburn was a favorite book back in the day, and her peach pie is my go-to recipe in the summer when the good peaches are in. I thought I would post the recipe today in her honor. Try it--it's worth it.

Nora Ephron's Sour Cream Peach Pie (from Heartburn)

Put 1 1/4 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup butter, and 2 tablespoons sour cream into a Cuisinart and blend until they form a ball. Pat out into a buttered pie tin, and bake 10 minutes at 425 degrees. Beat 3 egg yolks slightly and combine with 1 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons flour, and 1/3 cup sour cream. Pour over 3 peeled, sliced peaches arranged in the crust. Cover with foil. Reduce the oven to 350 degrees and bake 35 minutes. Remove the foil and bake 10 minutes more, or until the filling is set. 

(Note: I usually use a few more peaches, and I have to bake it a little longer until the custard is set.)

Dinner With A Top Chef

So if you don't watch Top Chef, you won't appreciate this post, but Mike Isabella was a star on two seasons of Top Chef, and was the runner-up on Top Chef All Stars. We love to watch Top Chef and Mike Isabella was always a favorite of ours, because he was from DC and was the chef at a restaurant in the building where Walt works downtown, Zaytinya. Now he has his own hip happening restaurant downtown, Graffiato, and we went there last night with Julia to celebrate both Walt's and my birthdays.

Pork belly with cannelini beans and ham

The menu is all small plates, so you get a nice selection of different tastes and flavors, brought out in succession. Of course I completely forgot to take pictures until the end of the meal, so you won't see the crispy brussels sprouts with maple, pancetta, and egg, or the roasted cauliflower with pecorino cheese, the risotto with lobster and mascarpone, the chestnut agnolotti with butternut squash and brussels leaves, or the scallops with sunchokes, citrus, and almonds that we enjoyed. They were de-li-cious. We wanted to lick the plates.  I did finally remember my camera, and got pictures of the pork belly with cannelini beans and the pizza with black truffles, fontina, and a farmed soft egg. Dessert was a dense chocolate tart with sea salt gelato and the specialty of the restaurant, zeppoles.

Pizza with black truffle, fontina cheese, and farmed soft egg

Looking out the window from our table

Zeppoles with autumn spices and pumpkin caramel

After dinner, Julia spoke to the waiter and asked if we could meet Mike Isabella, and told her it was our birthdays. (Sometimes it's good to have an assertive daughter.) So we got to meet Mike, talk about his experience on Top Chef (I asked about Padma, and yes, he is still friends with several of the other contestants), and he even put his arm around me and posed for a picture with moi!! So cool! It was a really fun night.

Julia and me

Oh, and I almost forgot, the coolest thing is they have prosecco on tap! Woo hoo!

Cookie Exchange 2011

Ellen, Eileen, Prudy

Last night was our famous Christmas Cookie Exchange. Eileen and Prudy came over to my house for dinner and we had a butternut squash lasagna and citrus salad. We first enjoyed some wine and oohed and aahed over all the cookies, and more importantly, the containers and little presents we put in along with the cookies. We spend a lot of time admiring each others containers and themes.

We are big into the presentation. This all began back in the day because Eileen felt her cookies weren't as good as Prudy's and mine, so she started putting her cookies into cute containers and adding little gifties. Now the containers are as important as the cookies! This year Eileen used a French Chocolat market bag, Prudy used beautiful wooden bowls she bought on her Vermont vacation, and I used a big blue flower pot.

After dinner, we have a sampling of all our cookies. This year Prudy made rugelach, a chocolate cookie with nutella (new this year), and a praline topped cookie. Eileen made chocolate caramel (a repeat that Julia requested!), a ginger cookie, and a lemon wafer with frosting. I made chocolate shortbread hearts, vanilla pretzels, and apricot bowties. Prudy brought a few extra raspberry thumbprints for dessert.

These are Eileen's caramel topped chocolate cookies that Julia requested. The presentation in that little box with the Christmas paper is excellent!

Prudy put her cookies in these cute peppermint bags.

And these are my containers, packed up with cookies and pressies, ready for Cookie Exchange.

We all had our Christmas socks on...

Yummo

These Cookie Exchanges seem to be coming around faster and faster,  and it's hard to believe we have been carrying on this tradition for 28 years.  We all agreed that's a pretty solid tradition, and a whole lot of cookies!!

Yummo

Summer Pudding

Last night we had the Bensons, Rubards, Lappans, and Betsy over for dinner and I made a new dessert. It was an English summer pudding, something I have always wanted to try after hearing Liz talk about making it in the summer and how delicious it was. Here are some pix of the prep:

Sliced challah bread

Simmering strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and blackberries with a little sugar until syrupy

Starting to layer bread and berries

Plate on top and weighed down with heavy can for 24 hours

Et voila, perfect summer pudding! Serve with whipped cream

It was great to see everyone. All our kids grew up together, so we have been friends for a long time. The talk of the night was that Herndon was just named #34 in CNN's best places to live. Who  knew?

CNN Money says the town "provides a great base to explore the many jobs in the area. Herndon sits right near the so-called Dulles Technology Corridor, where companies such as AOL, Microsoft, and Verizon are big employers."

"Alternatively, residents can make the commute to Washington D.C., 22 miles away. The public schools here are a big draw for many: Newsweek consistently ranks Herndon High in the top 5% of the country."

Over the course of the night, we decided to resurrect our old Progressive Dinner that we used to do at Christmas time. (I got the idea from Mom and Dad, who used to do this at Christmas time with their friends.) This time we're going to do it in October.

Benny, Gillian, Mark

Mary, me, Gillian, Betsy