Concord Grape Yeh-Hi and Secrets of the Tiramisu Revealed

Got some Concord grapes yesterday as part of my CSA fruit share. Love the taste, but I find the seeds and the skins labor intensive. So I put all the grapes into the blender and then strained the results. The liquid was rather thick, it would have gone very well with some yogurt. But it was the cocktail hour, so I added some lime for zing, some vodka for zap, and some orange bitters for luck. On ice, of course, Tasty.

Now, SM wanted to know about the tiramisu we made over the weekend. We followed, very roughly, Food Network hottie G.D. Laurentis’s recipe. Except that we added the beaten egg whites from all six eggs as well, because OHS, who is quite rigorous on the subject of tiramisu, said they had to be in there. (Unfortunately, Cousin Alexandra’s recipe was in Italian). Also, we put cocoa on top of both layers. It's the law in Italy, evidently.

Expresso: we ran out, so have extra, but (!) dip the ladies lightly. (You know how sensitive ladies are). I’d also sweeten the coffee a bit, too, next time.

About those ladies: we used two packs of store-bought no-name ladyfingers, twice as much as the recipe called for, (remember, we added a lot of air with the beaten eggs to the yoke/mascarpone mixture). Based on past experience, confirmed here, these store bought ’fingers are pretty unsatisfactory unless you dry them out a bit in very low oven beforehand. I wish I knew some ladies with extra fingers.

We used middle-shelf brandy, which had neither a positive nor a negative effect.

Note that some recipe’s call for a double boiler to take care of the raw egg issue, which would make it more custardy, which would not be a bad thing, but we trusted our eggs (me a little more leerily than OHS) and lived to tell the tale.