Over memorial day weekend we celebrated our 5th anniversary...I really can't believe it's been 5 years!!! For our anniversary dinner I made a sausage and rice timbale and it was phenomenally delicious.
I'm not sure how all timbales are constructed, but this one was made by cooking risotto rice, mixing it with egg and cheese, and packing it around the edges of a spring form pan, filling the center with a sausage tomato sauce & then packing more rice on top and baking to set.
I was really amazed at how well it held shape after I took off the spring form pan. It was fun to make, creating the rice structure was very much like making a graham cracker crust for a cold pie, in other words...it involved much playing with my food.
When you cut it open it looks like this:
And it was absolutely delicious! According to my husband it tasted like high end restaurant food (he's no dummy, he knows how to go for the big points). I don't know what level of food it tasted like, but it tasted realllllly, realllllllly good! Basically I guess I'm saying that you shouldn't be intimidated by this (or any!) complicated recipe, it wasn't hard, it was pretty fun, and it was SO worth it!
Book Review:
Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
Like all of Jasper Fforde's series this world is filled with random rules that don't make sense to the reader and form a bizarre landscape that the main character is fighting his way through, making decisions that make no sense to the reader but make perfect sense in the world Fforde has created.
Fforde uses very little exposition and I really enjoy the way he drops the reader into the middle of these rather bizarre worlds and forces the reader to fend for him/herself in understanding the rules and preconceptions that the world is built upon.
Fun & enjoyable, forcing you to adjust the way you look at the world.
However, if you haven't read any Jasper Fforde before, I much more strongly recommend his Thursday Next series. The first one is The Eyre Affair. This series centers around a main character who is a literary detective because in this bizarre world people can go in and OUT of books, so characters escape from books and set themselves up in the real world but then are missing in all the copies of the book, sometimes she has to go INTO the book to solve some sort of crime or problem and she is written into the story...if you enjoy literature, bad puns, and puzzling your way through things that create paradoxes (paradoxi?), you will really enjoy this series.
I loved The Eyre Affair! I have read most of that series, although it's been a while. The timbale looks absolutely delicious - I may have to try that (Rick's birthday is this weekend, hmmm). BTW, I just got myself the newest eInk Nook (and passed my old one on to Kivrin)! So cool...
Posted by: Jocelyn | June 16, 2011 at 11:58 AM
I had no idea what was going to be inside from the picture - thought it was going to be dessert ;o)
Posted by: trek | June 22, 2011 at 05:02 PM
Looks and sounds yummy! Congrats on the anniversary.
Posted by: Julia | July 01, 2011 at 12:53 AM