Weekend Cooking, and UFO's

This weekend, my friend Nichole came over to cook. She thinks I'm a good cook and could teach her how. I like to cook, I don't know if that makes me a good cook. But I do enjoy it and that helps. It has taken me this long to post the pics, cause I forgot to take pics of the finished dish.
I showed her how to make a fillet pork loin, stuffed with fruit. We reconstituted dried fruit with apple juice and chicken both.

Juicy dried fruit.

Then rolled the loins and tied them.

After roasting. Isn't is beautiful? And it tastes great too.

What started this whole business, was she said she had a bag of sweet potatoes and she wanted to know what to do with them. My inner thought was "YUCK, throw them away!" But I did some research and thought we could make a nice crusty bread with some.

Nichole's brother-in-law had made a sweet potato souffle for Thanksgiving and she wanted to make that. Again I thought"YUCK" but agreed to help her.

First step was to boil the potatoes until soft. Next beat them with butter, milk, eggs and sugar. (not sounding to bad right?)

Put whipped potatoes in a baking dish. Top with a mixture of chopped pecans, baking spices, brown sugar, flour and butter.

Here is where the pictures change.

When we ate that souffle on Sunday (like a big girl I tried it and boy was I surprised). I liked it so much, that I made it again for my small group meeting last night. The only deference being that I put the souffle in small ramekins. Great stuff! And I learned that I do like sweet potatoes.

This is a story of a failed cooking attempt.

I decided to make that same small group guinea pigs last night with a new recipe. This was a British recipe I found online. I had to guess on a couple of things. Like the baking temp and the crust. Well something was not right.

You take a ripe pear and hollow out the seeds with a melon baller. Fine. You add pured dried fruit. Fine. Wrap in a pasty shell.
They look fine here. Sprinkled with sugar and ready for the oven. I thought I had mastered it.
This is what they looked like when I opened the oven. FAIL!

How embarrassing. They looked terrible, but when I returned home last night, my Husband had eaten 2. He said they were wonderful. Well I rely on looks to convey my foods good taste and there was no way I was going to present these to my small group.
In other news, we have more UFO's. This was my first attempt at free motion. I was jerky and not having fun, so it was packed away. This would be good to finish and give to my Guild as a community quilt.
Cousin Nikki found this and gave it to me to do something with. Well I started to add those purple squares to it and then got side tracked and there it sat. Someday I'll finish it and give it back to Cousin Nikki.

Have a productive day, Brandie