Vanilla Cream (Page 764)

RECIPE #803

• Date: Sunday, July 27, 2008 - 5pm
• Location: Somerville, MA
• Kitchen: Matty's Apartment
• Dining Companions: Matty, Juice, Scarecrow, Paps, Grant, Russ, Mitch, Carrie, and Alex P
• Recipe Rating: A-
  

This cream was a component recipe for a pie I made for the bachelor party a couple weeks ago. It would be pretty hard to go wrong with a recipe like this. The only ingredients were heavy cream, vanilla, and sugar. How could that be bad? The method: beat everything together -- very simple. The recipe gave the option of using either a vanilla bean or vanilla extract. To save a few bucks I used vanilla extract and that still produced a delicious result. This slightly sweetened, slightly vanilla-scented whipped cream was a perfect accompaniment to the berry pie it went with, but also would be great on a whole variety of other sweet things. Yum!

Here is the recipe.

Hello from Montreal! Last night I went to Vero and Philippe's wedding, which was so fun! The ceremony and reception were both held at a restaurant/club in downtown Montreal. The restaurant had a terrace on the third floor, and the ceremony was held out there -- it was very nice. Vero and Philippe both looked great and the ceremony was brief but really nice (although, admittedly, in French -- my French is not good enough to have understood everything!). Then we had an amazing meal. Wedding food is typically pretty bad, but they had some seriously good food at this wedding. The menu (as I recollect it): First course: a choice of cream of asparagus soup with shrimp or a citrus microgreens salad. Second course: a choice a lobster bolognese with caviar or foie gras with a strawberry compote and fig reduction. Third course: a choice of seared salmon or rack of lamb. Dessert: A choice of strawberries in melon cream or hazelnut mousse cake. Basically: yum! I had the salad, foie gras, lamb, and mousse, and everything was delicious! The big, tasty dinner was followed by several hours of dancing, which provided some much needed movement after how much I ate. It was a great time! Everything at the wedding was elegant and lovely -- just like the two of them!

We are soon off to a post-wedding brunch and then headed back to Boston. Tomorrow I fly to California. Busy, busy... At least this is a good kind of traveling -- the kind where you get to spend time with people that you care about a lot!