Hey Good Lookin...

I don't know if you know this about me, but I am a brilliant chef. Shut up, I AM a brilliant chef, stop laughing. Ok, I am more like a brilliant chef that just got lazy and stopped trying, but still I am brilliant deep inside as I cook. I watch the food network religiously, unless someone irritating is on (I'm looking at you Sandra Lee and you too Rachel). And in my mind I am cooking right along with the greats and am a caviar aficionado (even though the thought of actually eating or being near fish eggs makes me gag just a little bit).

So, every once in a while I get on a gourmet kick and my darling husband and daughter just roll their eyes and secretly start stashing junk food in their underwear drawers. I don't know how a three year old can manage to find Twinkies to stash in her underwear drawer, but Mia is my daughter so I am not entirely surprised. A few nights ago I was determined to create Nectarine Salad with green tomato confiture and hazel nut sabayon. So I went to Albertsons and bought some nectarines and then I skipped the whole tomato idea because I remembered I hate tomatoes. I gathered the rest of the ingredients and rushed home in order to begin what was sure to be a life changing dish.

The French Laundry Cookbook wanted me to slice the nectarines into paper thin slices, but since I had to hurry and cut them up before Charlie got home and took the knives away from me in order to spare himself another emergency room bill, I just ended up cutting them in half. The recipe called for six nectarines but somehow one of them disappeared into Mia's mouth (ok, maybe I ate half of it, but she started it).

Then it was time to make a sabayon. What the heck is a sabayon, Amy? Well, if you were a gourmet chef like me you would know that it is a creamy sauce...kind of like melted ice cream. In fact, I used melted hazelnut chocolate ice cream, because hagen daaz was on sale and it had almost all the same ingredients on the label that were in the sabayon recipe, so there. It was totally justified. Also, I was suppose to make a sort of hazelnut meringue cookie, but it looked like a lot of fuss for just a couple of cookies so I used a couple of Mia's animal crackers.

I don't know how to post pictures on this blog yet (Russ's Amy needs to give me a lesson), so I can't convey the end result adequately. But it was good. It didn't look like the picture in the recipe book because I used only 15 percent of the ingredients it suggested, but it made me happy and Mia actually ate it. Charlie didn't because we ate it all before he came home, but he would have loved it too. I'll have to tell him about it sometime.