Curried brussels sprouts with currants

This Cooks Illustrated recipe came out ridiculously delicious. The flavors were mixed delicately and swimmingly. Plus it has curried currants. How can you resist?

Pumpkin cranberry muffins

Then, since I had some pumpkin goop left over, I made muffins. The pumpcran combination is an odd one, and they probably would complement each other better if I included the walnuts that the recipe recommended, but I'm not a big fan of nuts. But these came out nice and moist, and once you get used to the odd combination it's pretty nice. Plus I got to chop up the frozen cranberries in the nut chopper. I was pleased that it worked.

Pumpkin tart

So I've been sick this week, and I was unable to properly "do" Thanksgiving. But I got a rush of energy on Thanksgiving day itself, so I made a few items. First was pumpkin tart -- I would have made pumpkin pie, but I didn't feel like making a pie crust, and I had some tart crusts in the freezer. This was billed as being a "pumpkin ginger molasses" tart, but the ginger was undetectable. The molasses helped to "darken" the flavor of the tart, but that's about it. Otherwise, it wasn't much other than a thin pumpkin pie.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Olive oil bread

I made some more. But now I'm starting to think that the olive oil taste is so strong that the bread doesn't really go with anything. It's still tasty on its own...

Apple muffins

Oh, I forgot to mention. I made apple muffins the other day. I was up early and thought they would be quick and easy to make. And, indeed, they were. They tasted fine as well.

I couldn't tell if they were healthy or not. Muffins are notorious for being bad for you but I couldn't figure out what in the ingredients was supposed to be so bad. I used some whole wheat flour both for the healthiness and for the nutty taste.

Apple spice oatmeal cookies

One of the ingredients was apple juice concentrate. And these are indeed tasty, appley cookies. With raisins. Pretty much what you'd hope from apple oatmeal raisin cookies. Yup.

Ravioli

The ravioli were filled with ricotta, gorgonzola, and pine nuts. I put some butter, sage, and red pepper on them. They were pretty nice. It's always hard to tell how much ravioli you'll need to satisfy yourself -- I wound up gorging on it all.

I am tempted to get a pasta-shaping machine.

Olive oil bread

This is a seed-filled bread where some of the moisture comes from olive oil (rather than water). It is pretty great. The olive oil lends a great smell and taste to the bread, but also it makes it surprisingly soft to cut into and chew. I suspect that, if this bread lasted a few days, it would last a few days.

Pear jam/compote

There were a few pears that weren't going to last much longer, so I thought I'd make jam out of them. But the jam didn't set, so I guess I have an ice cream topping instead. This is not the greatest tragedy.

Rye bread

I've been feeling sick most of this week. I tried to get back into the swing of things by making some rye bread. I slashed the bread as usual before putting it in the oven, but this time, yowza, it decided it really, really, really wanted to expand. It looks like the center of the bread violently pushed out along the slash lines. Pretty amazing.