Dutiful dinner report

Friday night Stir dinner:

Chicken soup with caraway gnocchi. You brown chicken, onion, carrot, celery, and various herbs, add water and simmer for an hour and a half. Meanwhile, make potato gnocchi the usual way, but with caraway seeds. Poach. When the chicken is falling off the bone, strain the broth, then add some chicken meat back to the broth, plus broccoli, cauliflower, and shredded cabbage. Cook until the vegetables are tender. Add the caraway gnocchi.Great soup.

For dessert: chocolate mousse. I'm not crazy about chocolate mousse, but decided to try Barbara Lynch's recipe because we had cream to use up and, of course, lots of eggs. Lynch's mousse was rich and airy and smooth, like any proper mousse, and everyone liked it a lot. I even liked it a lot, if not quite as much as everyone else.

Today, Isabel and I used the leftover mousse to make petit fours. We're still in the middle of that project, so I can't report.

Half the petit fours will be sandwiched with mousse, half with kirsch-spiked black raspberry jam. This isn't a Lynch recipe, just something we wanted to try.

A propos of nothing, we collected our first duck egg today. It's very long and narrow and the shell is shinier than a hen's egg, has a waxy sheen. It will have to be an awfully delicious egg to justify the irritation of keeping our messy, noisy, unfriendly, weird-looking, chicken-bullying ducks.