Monday, December 31, 2012

Do you Fondue?

My daughter, Julia, decided the other day that we NEED to get a fondue pot.  Well, I have never had fondue so I was intrigued.  One of my goals for 2013 is to try new things and I thought this fit the bill nicely.  Maybe I was too young when fondue was all the rage decades ago, but apparently it's trendy again and we jumped right on the bandwagon eager to get our hands on some skewers and something warm and melty!!

I did some research and it's amazing how many different types of fondue pots are out there and also the price ranges!!  You can get some pretty fancy ones!  Having never had fondue, I didn't want to invest a lot of money for our little adventure and found this one in Target:

Oster Fondue Pot

It has great reviews and everyone seemed very pleased with it's performance and it's easy to clean (that's always a bonus!).  It also has a "break-away" electrical cord for those of you with little ones or are just clumsy so you don't burn yourself. 

Now, being the fondue novice that I am, I thought that you just put a bunch of cheese in the pot and let it melt away.  Wrong!!  So wrong!!  Thank goodness I came across this important information during my research, otherwise our Fondue Night could have been tragic.  Just tragic.  What I discovered is that fondue is really a combination of cheeses, wine, spices and sometimes cream or milk.  Who knew?  So, I figured we'd start with a basic cheese fondue recipe that I found online (I can't seem to locate the recipe online again so I don't have a link to it).  It got great reviews and was supposed to mimic one of the great fondues served at The Melting Pot.  Have you been?  I hear it's a great night out and loads of fun, but not too kind to your wallet!  The hubby and I are planning to go soon so I'll tell you all about it!

The kids helped me prepare the fondue and we cut up french bread, sausage, apples and broccoli to dip.  It was soooo good and so much fun!  We had a lot of laughs and loved dipping our skewers into the melty goodness.  I was skeptical of the recipe when we were making it.  We used 6 oz. of white wine (sauvignon blanc), 1 clove of minced garlic, 1 lemon squeezed, 1 cup of Gruyere shredded,1 cup of muenster shredded, a few dashes of freshly ground pepper and a few dashes of nutmeg.  Delish!

 



I think I will be purchasing this cookbook to try some new recipes for our future Fondue Nights!

Dip Into Something Different: A Collection of Recipes from Our Fondue Pot to Yours

Do you have a fondue pot?  Do you have favorite fondue recipes to share? 

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Getting Ready for 2013

Booktini took 2012 off from blogging, but we're ready to start up again in 2013!  We will be bringing you book reviews, organizing tips, product reviews and lots of fun stuff!  

We will be reading Home Front by Kristin Hannah for our first book of 2013.


We've also selected these books for 2013:
A few of these books are by authors who have participated in one of our book club meetings for a previous book they've written. I've provided links to their blogs so you can check them out.  We've also left a couple of slots open in 2013 for any "must reads" that suddenly come along!  Remember Gone Girl this year?  Yeah, those are the runaway hits we like to leave room for!  

Are you in a book club?  Do you pick all your books for the whole year or do you do it moth by month?  I think most of us in Booktini are "planners" and like to have a list for the year with some wiggle room.  Most of us will read other books as well, along with some audio books too.  I am currently listening to Pillars of the Earth right now by Ken Follet.  I love historical fiction and decided to listen to this after listening to his novel Fall of Giants, which is the 1st book of the Century Trilogy.  The 2nd book came out this year, Winter of the World and the reviews were so great that it sparked me to listen to the first novel.  I loved it and plan on listening to Winter of the World next.  Do you listen to audio books?  They make my commute to and from work much more enjoyable.