Saturday, January 19, 2008

Vanill-o-rama

We had our own Iron Chef cook off the other weekend - inspired by Rocio's (one of our graduate students from Mexico) gift of a HUGE bag of vanilla beans to Llew. With the gauntlet thrown down - we all tried to out do each other with creating yummy food flavored with vanilla. Alice has a nice overview of all the goodies and the evening. You can visit Llew and Gemma's website to get details on the behind the scene cooking story.

Me - well, I wanted to push the envelope of something to do with vanilla that wasn't dessert yet in some way made you think of dessert. My first thought was to make crab puffs flavored with vanilla. However, Lafayette and fresh crab is not a real option. So I started playing around with a baklava type theme - except a savory baklava. Baklava is that yummy philo, nuts, and honey dessert that you find in the Mediterranean (Turkey, Greece, etc.). I poked around and found, yes, bacon baklava. It was just weird enough that I knew I had found my recipe. I will say it was darned tasty (lots of comments about how it tasted like mince pie). However, a word of warning, cold "bacon-lava" is not good. Imagining eating cold french toast with bacon bits. Yugh.

I will say that the smell of the apartment was fabulous - not that cloying vanilla room freshener smell but a cornucopia of smells laced with real vanilla. Lovely.

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