Wednesday, October 17th - Belated Happy Anniversary

It's a cooler 7' this morning and quite breezy. It should reach a high of 10' later with a mix of sun and cloud. The last couple of days were amazing. On Tuesday morning it was 17' at 5:00 am! I was listening to a southern Ontario radio station and at 8:00 their time it was 4'. Guess it will be headed this way soon. Tonight will be chillier at 1' so a fire in the stove might just be in order.

Just want to wish daughter Patti and husband Greg a Happy Anniversary, which was yesterday. They're usually too busy carting kids around to activities to do anything together but one of these years they'll be able to go out for a nice dinner somewhere to celebrate on the actual day.

Sticky date pudding

Last night was cooking class number 5. We did New Orleans style Bread Pudding with Whiskey Sauce and traditional PEI Sticky Date Pudding, which is really just a very dense and moist cake. Both types are doused with an alcohol based sauce, although the alcohol is optional, but necessary in my opinion. It does add so much flavour.
Brenda came over on Monday evening and we made both dishes in advance, to take with us. They take a very long time to bake and we didn't think we'd have time to bake both as well as eat, so we made the eating ones ahead of time. We did have time to finish baking the sticky date and eat it, but the bread pudding I brought home to bake here.

Both recipes were a hit and everyone enjoyed them.  Brenda and I talked about the class on the way home and for next weeks class we'll once again go back to the demo style. One student mentioned that she hadn't actually seen a step in a recipe the week before because she was busy working on something else. That got us to thinking that if they are there to learn, then they need to see all the steps. So next week, we'll have the students prep all the ingredients and then I'll cook it on the induction burner at the table so they can see what we're doing. It may be a better way of dealing with such a large class in such cramped quarters. Brenda found it a bit confusing and disjointed last night and I have to agree with her. So, we'll just have to fix it!

I stopped in at Brenda's on our way home to drop her off and we had a glass of wine while deciding  the fate of a couple of items she had in her freezer. There are definitely a couple of new dishes on the way.