Saturday night's family meal was breaded veal scallopini, unremarkable, zucchini strands with thyme-butter, good (I will make again) and some rough cut round pasta from Sardinia I picked up at Essex Market. Laurent had made a truffle sauce with mushroom stock which, to me, saved the dinner since I had a little trouble with the veal. Cooking the breaded veal was like crepes. The first couple ones are disaster then thet progressively get better until you have one perfect one. I was unispired by the veal. I thought of making a roll-up, but it didn't seem worth it. It was not one of my better meat nights.

I also made a dessert, dulce de leche bread pudding. I made it A - Zed, as Laurent put it. I baked some sweet bread with orange zest in my bread maker (BTW I did make the seeded bread with whole wheat and bread flour, I had to make it twice. The first time it was a crumbly bunch of rock. The second time was better, a real loaf, but pretty dense. I think I am having problems with yeast amout and salt). It wasn't very sweet, but had a nice orange zest thing going. I used the recipe from Delish.com. I decreased it by a third, used the dulce de leche brought to me by Laurent's brother and sister-in-law from France, used half cream and half skim and no chocolate. I thought it was pretty good, it had a nice caramel flavor and crispy bits. A vanilla topping would have been nice. I would have melted choclate or vanilla icecream in the fridge for a topping if I had any. Maybe I could have added some salt, too.

Super Bowl Sunday I did some "football food".I have been wanting to do barbeque ribs for awhile, but I am not a huge fan of them so an opportunity would have to be right in my face to make them. They were on sale at FreshDirect. I used Neely's recipe and marinated them in a dry rub of paprika, sugar and onion powder for almost 24 hours and added Kim's spice rub and some extra salt to the ribs and baked them 3&1/2 hours at 275dgrees in the oven. The ends were a bit like jerky. The flavor was too sweet for me and only the fat was tasty to me. I researched how to cook them in the oven and the couple recipes I had were all low and slow with no instruction as to whether to wrap in foil or cover so I just left them exposed. Maybe next time I will cover with foil. I think that's what I may make for Easter in Boston. I have made nearly every dish for a crowd I can think of.

I also made a pretty healthy black bean salad with tomato, avocado, purple onion, lemon, chili and cumin powder and green Tabasco. I would have rather used lime, cilantro and jalapeno instead of lemon and powdered spices, but its too damn cold right now to run out and get those things. It was still good and it is a nice add to lettuce salad and smoked salmon. I love avocado!