foodiefanatics

Doing a birthday brunch for my sister in law tomorrow.  This is quite the cooking weekend.  We are having greek yogurt with figs (using that fig tree again!) with honey (from a local purveyor made with thistle) and pine nuts. We had a similar yogurt dish at a restaurant in San Diego for Brunch (Cafe Chloe) We are doing grapefruit mimosas (with a bit of cranberry juice in them, Sunset May 08), puffy pancake with nutty banana butterscotch (Rachel Ray, I've made it now about 5 times and we love it), lamb sausage (from our farm, deck family farm), and wrinkled potatoes with spicy chile mojo (this is xeroxed from a cookbook but I don't know which cookbook!).  My daughter is making a boxed cake and I'm going to make some kind of Indian dessert as well but haven't decided what yet.

Tonight, I've got an unusual combination of dishes. We're starting with a fig pizza with goat cheese and prosciutto (but I'm actually going to use sopresetta because I'm kind of tired of prosciutto and its texture).  I've got figs on my fig tree so I'm trying fig recipes. And, I'm retrying the pizza crust recipe from cooking light that I made such a mess of last time. That starter will be followed by halibut with corn gravy and chive mashed potatoes (Rachel Ray, 7/08).  The corn gravy is a mix of bacon, milk, chicken broth, corn, thyme and red bell pepper.  Dessert is a carrot cake recipe I downloaded from epicurious.com that was originally from Bon 10/04. 
I did a bunch of research before picking this recipe.  I looked through four different recipes trying to get a sense of the differences.  The recipes were quite different. Some had very little flour, other very little carrot. The Martha STewart recipe had 1 1/2 pounds of cream cheese and 3/4 cup of butter in the frosting!  Sounded great but too much.  This recipe had lots of reviews that were very positive and seemed a bit middle of the road.
I'm doing the crust for the pizza on the grill.  Hope it works out.