More Holiday Fun

All right, I finished the pie today.  Here it is:

Looks pretty tasty, but I probably won't try it until tomorrow night.  I hope it's good.  This is one of my favorite pies, apple and cranberry with just a little bit of almond extract.  I basically adapted it from this recipe in combination with the basic apple pie recipe in "The Joy of Cooking".  I just look at these recipes to find out cook times and about how much sugar and flour goes into the filling.  The rest I just sort of make up.  This means that my pies always taste differently. 


I also made the crab salad with rocket from the "400 Appetizers" book.  I was lucky in that I didn't actually have to dress any crabs.  I was able to buy two dressed crabs from Sainsbury's for a very reasonable price.

All I had to do was remove the meat from the shells, and get to work.  The recipe was pretty easy to follow, and before long, I had two plates of crab salad on rocket.  This is a little sad, because I had to then eat both plates alone.  Crab salad doesn't last too long, and I didn't have anybody to share with readily available.  I guess I could have just made one big plate, but two looks better.  Here's the prettier one:

I wasn't too impressed with the flavor.  Maybe I'm just not much of a crab person, but I felt that it was just a little bland.  There were just too many flavors mixed up in there, and the rocket and lemon completely overpowered whatever crab taste wasn't covered up by the Tabasco sauce in the crabby mixture.  All-in-all, I wasn't impressed.  If I were to make it again, I'd probably use some fresher crab and fewer ingredients.

Next up is recipe number 329, Amaretto Soufflé.  Looks like I'll need to get a soufflé dish.  I've also got this nice link to some flour tortillas.