This afternoon, my book club met at my house. The book for this month was Joe Biden’s Promises to Keep. I don’t usually read autobiographies, but I enjoyed Biden’s and I liked learning more about someone who could eventually be vice-president. It was a cold and rainy Sunday, and I wanted to make a meal that was simple and warm, and used the vegetables I had from my weekly produce box. (Actually, at first I thought it might be fun to make book-themed food, but it turns out Joe Biden’s favorite meal is pasta, and his favorite dessert is oatmeal-raisin cookies, so that didn’t really fit with what I wanted to serve).

Last night, I set some dough for No Knead Bread, using a combination of white and white-whole-wheat flour. This afternoon, I took half of the dough out of the refrigerator, formed it in my baguette pans and let it re-rise. I used a bit too much dough and the baguettes overflowed their chambers a little, but they came out quite tasty.  I I found a sweet potato soup in Robin Robertson’s Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker, and I had nearly all of the ingredients from my box; I only had to buy fresh ginger. I made a salad with greens, olive oil, salt and pepper and some sliced oranges and their juice. For dessert, I used some plums that I had sliced and frozen right before our trip to Hawaii, and I made a cobbler. The cobbler turned out especially well, so I thought I’d share the recipe. The topping was adapted from a recipe for Pear, Cranberry and Vanilla Crumble from Regan Daley’s In The Sweet Kitchen: The Definitive Baker’s Companion.

Plum Cobbler

Filling

5-6 cups sliced ripe plums

1/4 c. flour

1 orange supremed and chopped

Zest of 1 orange

Topping

3/4 c. flour

3/4 c. sugar

3/4 c. margarine

3/4 c. rolled oats.

Combine filling ingredients in an 8×8 glass dish. In a medium bowl, mix flour and sugar and cut in margarine. Add oats and combine. Sprinkle topping over the filling. Bake at 350 until topping is brown and crisp.

A Book Club Meal