Happy Monday!

Happy Monday, all! Hope everyone had a great weekend.

Mine was a bit crazy. My triceps are aching and my hands sore. Yards of cold dough rolled and butter assaulted. Pounds upon pounds of butter! I spent the weekend beating on huge blocks of it with one of these. Now conjure up a mental image of that. Got it?

Yea, Mr. Humble tread lightly in the kitchen this weekend.

So after the Epi-blog "10 hardest" things I admit, I took the bait. I hit the kitchen this weekend intent on tackling several items. I even purchased extra butter this weekend so I could tackle the pastry making and I already buy a stupid amount of butter each week.

Naturally I'm attracted to the baking-type challenges on the list. The rest of them I'm a bit 'meh' about. Maybe because coq au vin doesn't seem like much of a challenge. Perhaps it would be if you were cooking the traditional geriatric barnyard fowl, but my local market is out of grizzled laying hens.

Dang.

So I decided to take on some of this 'tough' baking. Its been years since I've made a croissant from scratch or a true puff pastry but I'm a food blogger now and culinary self-flagellation is part of the job.

Now I am not saying there are not perks to having that much pastry lying around looking for use.



Oh yes. Happy Monday morning to me!

Unfortunately, I spent all weekend doing a super-human amount of cooking and didn't get around to preparing Monday's post. Since I don't have any recipes typed up I'm going to round up several photos taken over the course of the weekend just to fill space. Ha!

Homemade agnolotti stuffed with prosciutto and ground pork simmered in spiced red wine, with a creamy vodka sauce.

Mascarpone brownies with chocolate ganache

Mr. Humble's Spiced Kebabs

Two Pounds of diplomat cream for napoleons. Om nom nom!

Savory palmiers

All that out of the way, I'm going to go roll out more pain au chocolat and croissants to proof, finish my napoleons and then get work on my next batch of laminated dough.

I'm going to have arms like a pro-wrestler if I keep this up.