Champagne Panna Cotta for the New Year
Happy New Year, my dear friends!
For New Year’s Eve, I thought it would be fun to have a champagne dessert to drink with our champagne toast! This champagne-flavored panna cotta is super easy peasy-if you can warm cream on the stove, you can make this. The champagne flavor is quite bold so be sure to use a champagne that you love to drink! The booziness does mellow out over time, in fact, I found the panna cotta more to my liking 2 days after I made it. To accompany the panna cotta, I poached pears with a vanilla bean until they were tender and reduced the poaching liquid until it was syrupy. The pears and vanilla syrup were enjoyed the morning after with yogurt and granola, and I can’t wait to put them in my oatmeal and eat them with ice cream!
I hope you all had a nice weekend ringing in the New Year, perhaps over-indulging in the last hours of 2010 before those resolutions of 2011 kick in!
I don’t like to make New Year’s resolutions because it seems a bit disingenuous making grand promises about flossing everyday or working out 5 times a week, when I KNOW fully well that I will be breaking them before the month is out. Now that I’m thinking about it, I suppose it’s not actually the resolving part that I’m against- it’s the guilt and disappointment in myself that I feel when I break my resolutions that I would like to avoid! So though I have not explicitly made any resolutions (and therefore, you cannot fault me when I inevitably break them!), I am very proud of my first 2 days of 2011: I slept in (until 9:30 and 10), cleaned (part of) my room, was efficient in lab, tried a few recipes I’d tagged way back in 2010, and went to a yoga class. I hope this streak of motivation and improved attitude and time management continues into 2011, and most importantly, I look forward to all the new recipes and random ramblings I will share here in 2011!
