Recipe of the Month: April

These are just pretty tomatoes. They have nothing to do with the post.

The year is going by quickly. Tomorrow it will be May and Cook In / Dine Out will have been up for almost 4 months. April's most popular recipe was the Chicken Tortilla Pie, followed by the Lemon Cake with Honey-Mascarpone Frosting and Ginger-Brown Sugar Ice Cream. The most popular post for the second month is the Happy Endings Whore's Bath cocktail.

While I like every recipe that I post, I have my own favorites. These are the five recipes I've posted in the last 4 months that I like best:

1. Roasted Chicken with Greens and Bread Salad. I just love this dish. Every time I see it posted on my blog I want to have some. The bread salad, in particular, has such a remarkable flavor. 

2. Southwestern Salmon with Black Eyed Pea Succotash and Yellow Pepper Sauce. I like this dish a lot because it's an interesting combination of flavors and the colors make a beautiful presentation.

3. Gnocchi with Sausage-Mushroom Ragu. Gnocchi is a big hit in our house. This batch turned out perfectly and the sauce, while rich, complemented the little dumplings without burying their potato flavor.

4. Turkey and Butternut Squash Meat Loaf. I like this dish because I consider it a rather bold experiment that exceeded my expectations for how well it worked. 

5. Astoria Salad. This was the first recipe I posted and it's one of my favorite salads. I like that it takes a classic dish--Waldorf Salad--and reinterprets it as something lighter and fresher.

And my favorite cocktail:

Honey-Nut Old Fashioned. Another grand experiment that actually worked well. I've not done a lot of liquor infusions, so I feel fortunate that my first attempt, which could have gone horribly wrong, resulted in a nice flavor combination. Plus the fact that I was able to tie the whole thing into a popular cereal was fun too.