Before I ever had a food blog, I followed Is My Blog Burning? through blogs like Il Forno and The Food Section. I always wanted to participate, but I was usually without a kitchen or initiative. This month, Amy of Cooking With Amy, offered up a very serendipitous topic: noodles. Today is Chinese New Year, and thus an excellent time to be cooking noodles. I chose a dish that my mom’s been cooking for years and asked her to show me how to do it. The noodles are crisp, with toppings and sauce in the middle, and is designed to look like a bird’s nest. They’re also delicious.

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Last night, I went to another shindig in a continuing series, and once again made something for the event. Since it took place at only six o’clock, I thought I’d make something more along the line of hor d’oeurves than dessert.

The first thing that occurred to me was melon wrapped in prosciutto, the like of which I first saw in Madrid. There, it was made with Serrano ham, which is very similar to prosciutto. I thought the combination was incredibly bizarre, but when I tried it, I found the combination to be one of those great salty-sweet things, like chocolate covered pretzels. To make them as hor d’oeurves, slice a melon, such as cantaloupe, into cubes, wrap them in thinly sliced prosciutto, and stick toothpicks in them.

I nosed around a bit to find something else to bring as well, and really liked the idea of these Truffes de Chèvre Frais from Chocolate & Zucchini. I used cayenne pepper mixed with breadcrumbs, chopped dill, and chopped walnuts as toppings. In an effort to make them look like chocolate truffles, I made them the size of marbles, which was about twice as much cheese as Clotilde suggests. I thought the goat cheese taste was a little strong, and next time I’d follow instructions and make them about 5 grams each. Luckily, the package was measured in grams as well as ounces.

Last weekend, I started to cook my first recipe from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I decided on cassoulet because I’d had it before and loved it, and because I had some goose and goose fat I wanted to use. Cassoulet is a regional dish from the South of France consisting of beans and meats, usually pork, sausage, and lamb. The beans and each meat is cooked seperately and then together, the idea being that five or six things that taste great individually build into one amazing flavor. Julia’s recipe also calls for some pretty hard to find items, such as raw pork rind and unsalted, unsmoked bacon. I managed to find some things at a German deli; others required a bit of ingenuity, such as rendering pork fat for the sausages.

Cassoulet, as you may have guessed, is not a dish for dieters, which is why it was such bad timing when my dad and I joined Weight Watchers on Monday. The points of a dish can be determined by adding up those of the ingredients and dividing it by the number of servings. Since I cut the recipe in half, the entire cassoulet was 180 points. In order to make it easier to divide it into servings, I baked them individually. Each serving was a tenth of the ingredients, making it 18 points per serving.

A word of warning: cooking cassoulet is a marathon, not a sprint. You could probably cook it in two days if you really crammed it in, but I cooked a little every day from Saturday through Thursday without having to rush.

Julia writes the recipe really wonderfully, and her version, with the ingredients on the side and referring to other recipes rather than assimilating it, is more clear but less convenient. I left the recipe in her language as much as possible, changing the wording only to reformat it. Even though I only used half the recipe when I made it, but present it in its entirety here.

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