Hi, this is Bianca's Mom. Since Bianca has now finished her Gold Award, she has agreed to let me share her blog! Now, let me clear on this. I could not figure out how to set up a blog myself and I was little help for her in setting up this blog. What I did do was give her support, encouragement and transportation in order for her to get her project done. She had some problems and failures along the way and I made sure that she learned from these failures rather than be discouraged by them. When she was very busy with school homework, I would go ahead and cook some of the recipes she had chosen with the caveat that we would not go out and buy anything extra to make the recipe. This helped her to learn how to make many substitutions in the recipes to incorporate local food products. She also learned how to read recipes and quickly learn which ones would most likely be delicious and which ones were dubious. Over the course of this past year, she rarely choose recipes to test that we didn't like although some she choose had more of an "adult" spin to them, like the one below. This is a wonderful dish to bring as an appetizer to a party. It uses a majority of local products and you could make your own puff pastry but...we have done this and it is more work than most people would want to do, including us. Bianca and I have made homemade puff pastry in the past, but we lost patience with how many times you have to refrigerate, roll out, fold, refrigerate, roll out, fold, etc. that we just did everything at once and it wasn't very puffy! So, we used store-bought puff pastry for this recipe and it was still delicious.
Anyway, I look forward to joining Bianca on this blog and eating delicious, local food.
Ingredients:
1 sheet puff pastry
8 oz. round brie (Snowy Mountain Sheep Creamery)
1 tbsp. butter (Winder Farms)
1/2 cup chopped pecans (Thompson Family Pecan Farm)
1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 cup pear jam (homemade from my friend Lila)
1/4 tbl. honey (Clifford Family Farm)
1 egg, beaten (Clifford Family Farm)
crackers or cubes of fresh bread (all homemade!)
1. Defrost the puff pastry for 15-20 minutes, then unfold and place on cookie sheet prepared with parchment paper.
2. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
3. Melt the butter in medium pan over medium heat. Add pecans and saute about 5 minutes, stirring constantly to prevent burning. Add cinnamon and stir until pecans are well coated.
4. Slice the top rind off the brie round with a sharp knife without removing too much of the cheese itself.
5. Spread pear jam over top of brie then spread the pecans on top of the jam and drizzle with one tbl. of honey.
6. Place the brie in the center of the defrosted puff pastry. Gather up the edges of the pastry and gently squeeze the pastry into the brie round. Gently fold the pastry around the top and seal. Brush the beaten egg over the top and side of the brie.
7. Bake for 20 minutes or until the pastry is a golden brown.
8. Serve warm with cubes of fresh bread or crackers.
adapted from www.yummly.com
Options:
-use different jams. We have made this with pepper jam and raspberry jams and it is really delicious.
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