Big Cooking Weekend!

I had a big weekend filled with great cooking and baking projects mixed in with adventures with friends on a beautiful Maine fall day.

It started with an inspiration from Tastespotting: a breakfast casserole. Layers of potatoes, cheddar cheese, eggs and bacon baked with cream until bubbly.

I then spent a rainy afternoon watching movies and looking up recipes online to use up some chicken in the fridge. The solution was my first and really yummy attempt at General Tao's Chicken

The next morning was a canoe trip to the cranberry bog where we mucked around in cold water up to our knees and picked oodles of wild cranberries

To help ward off the chill of cranberry picking we put together a huge seafood chowder. We had the meat of five lobsters leftover in the freezer as well as some shrimp and haddock to use up. It fed six of us and we had enough for lunch the next day. We followed this with a campfire in the backyard.

Finally, I had to bake something using the cranberries! I made some awesome brownies a la Dorie Greenspan and a cranberry hazelnut sauce. They were awesome. I was so excited to try these that I was pulling bowls of chowder away from people still chewing and demanding we start desert!