Ham & egg pastries; mini palmiers

Friday night I made ham and egg puff pastry squares from CI's Restaurant Favorites at Home. I had previously made this for brunch, with a cream sauce I opted out of this time, and had an extra sheet of puff pastry from that I needed to use up. Obviously it's very hard to go wrong with 1) puff pastry 2) Black Forest ham 3) Gouda (which I subbed for the cheddar called for) and 4) soft scrambled eggs.

For the pastries, you unfold a sheet of pastry and cut out a 9" circle. This leaves you with a significant amount of scraps left over. I decided this was unacceptable and Googled around for an easy way to use them. Behold, mini palmiers: you just stack the scraps of dough on top of each other (do not squeeze together or knead them), then roll them out into a rough rectangle. Sprinkle the rectangle generously with cinnamon sugar. Starting from one short end, roll tightly halfway up. Roll the same way from the other end til they meet. Using a sharp knife, slice the dough lengthwise into 1/4 to 1/2" palmiers. Bake on a parchment-lined baking sheet at 400 for about 15 minutes or until lightly golden.

Saturday for dinner I was planning another tapas sort of thing, but I was lethargic and we were out much of the day and I couldn't get excited about labor-intensive stuffed mushrooms and salt cod in tomato garlic confit, which didn't really go together anyway. I had Mike find me an easy recipe online (which means I'm really in an anti-cooking stupor), a Martha Stewart one in fact, and I ended up using the last of my precious salt cod on pan-fried fish cakes. They certainly weren't bad, but I felt a little silly.

Today we managed to sleep for no less than three hours in the middle of the afternoon (M hasn't been sleeping well, but I have, so I have no idea what's wrong with me), hence the time stamp on this post. Somehow shortly after we emerged from hibernation we were hungry, so I heated up Julia Child's cream of leek and potato soup which I made Friday, and made some small Gruyere and sauteed mushroom burgers. Yes, burgers and French soup, a classic combination. I will say the Gruyere-mushroom combination works très bien, but I think everybody except me already knew that.