A Backward Glance and a Forward Stance

(Can you tell I'm an Edith Wharton fan? :-)
My verdict on the savory bread pudding is: enh. It looks very nice in the photos, but warmed up in the microwave it ends up being not so flavorful, and soggy scrambled eggs and corn on the bottom. Although the corn is good and sweet, the soggy egg/cream combination does not do it for me. Any advice/ comments as to why that is? I had misgivings myself, but as this was (as usual) an experiment, I plowed full-speed ahead anyway. Let me know what you think.
That was made 2 days ago (and I will still be eating it for lunch at work all week). Now I'd like to turn to tonight, and what I made 'fuh comp'ny.'

The miso-pork-sweet-potato is an old favorite now, (although this was an innovation: keeping both the sweet potatoes and the miso pork mixture warm in a 150-degree oven- that was an attempt at food safety for the pork. You'll notice the blurry quality of the photo as I attempt to open the oven door with one hand, take the picture with the other so as not to let out all the heat!) the kale side dish a ragged, thrown-together effort, (the attempt to include some color throught he YELLOW and PURPLE sweet peppers- 50 cents a-piece!- went awry as they were trapped between the onions and kale and kind of wimped out) and the peach galette was my first successful endeavor with a real, honest-to-goodness, from-scratch pie crust (from Epicurious). Ready for Battle!
(this is halfway through the 'forking') It worked the biceps, let me tell you! Of course, now that I've done the butter and flour mixing 'by fork' I think I can progress to using the food processor, having earned my street cred. It was good, folks. Even with white peaches, my yellow favorites no longer being available at the farmers' market.Mmmmm... ready for the creme fraiche, aye, matey!

A-ha, er, hmm...

So the reason there were so many things 'wrong' with my roasted tomato sauce on that gnocchi was that I had only completed the first step of making the sauce: roasting the tomatoes, albeit in a fancified way. Apologies, and I will have to try the rest of the Leftoverist's recipe on the one serving of roasted tomato I have left some other time.
For tonight, I have been active, and come home with such a terrible hunger at 9 PM, that all that will do is to pull out the newly bought flatbread crisps, futz around in the fridge for a jar of roasted tomato and olive bruschetta that I have been trying to throw away for some months now (thrift prohibits my hand from following through, even though memory would have it gone), and plunk down to read the opening sally of a random romance I picked up at the library. Yes, Reader, that is where I whiled away about an hour this evening. Ever so nice. And then, since I had a few corners to round out for a dinner for friends tomorrow, I made a wide loop home by Whole Foods, and returned triumphantly home way past dinnertime, "two bags full," of good food and good books. What a lovely crisp fall evening.

Neither trudging nor trailblazing... forward

So I did get around to having that roasted tomato sauce on gnocchi, tonight, in fact. However, in several points my sauce needed help:
too soupy (should have used more than 2 tomatoes and broiled better)
too seedy (should have removed by straining or something)
too clumpy (should have ... smushed it with a fork?)
too ambivalent a color (again, more tomatoes, and not one red and one green would have helped)
Anyway, the flavor is still nice, and the vegan potato gnocchi in the frozen section of Whole Foods 'paired nicely.' Meanwhile, I returned to one of my standbys for a vegetable side: Roasted Cauliflower from Brownie Points blog. I used to have the blog on rotation, but as posting there is very infrequent, dropped it. Now I shoot straight for the cauliflower recipe, simple as it is. :-)
Also meanwhile (since I feel like I am just winding up for a run of cooking projects this week), I tried this recipe from The Leftoverist: Savory Bread Pudding with Corn and Tomatoes (and zucchini, in my case). Here's the before:
As I write, it is 18 minutes past her baking time, and not yet done however. This might be because the roasting of the zucchini didn't get out enough moisture and so now the bottom of the pan is still soupy. Or it could be because her hint about surrounding the loaf pan with boiling water (on a baking sheet) was foiled by my not-flat oven shelf, in which water runs down and toward the back and quickly provides an impression of Old Faithful. Something tells me that might not be good for the oven. *sigh*
Oh well. In other news, I had a very successfully balanced day: farmer's market bounty (all for $21),
a late and delicious brunch (pear with cottage cheese and drizzle of maple syrup),
going to the gym, and catching up with a dear friend on skype. In fact, the brunch was so good, the pear had to come back for an encore! The encore included a certain unidentified, whipped, chocolate-bearing substance (butter? cheese? I still don't know) procured from Founding Farmers last weekend, smuggled out in a Tupperware. Ahhh, glamourous thriftiness. I recommend FF for their philosophy and a few things very well done (such as the heavenly grits!). Anyone in DC, show their support!