Weekly cooking - great friends, great food

Ok, so I've been slacking on blogging in general, and more specifically, blogging about food.  So, today, you (and by you, I mean me, because who are we kidding, I'm writing this for my own ego) get treated to a smorgasbord (if you will) of recent menus.

First off, our besties (BFFs IYW) The Heart-Ds are moving to Australia for a couple of years.  Before Greg left, we decided to do a "best of" meal with them.  As a surprise, we made this cool shrimp cocktail:

Which looked really cool and tasted even better.  The next course was this amazing cold cucumber and avocado soup that you top with red onion, cucumber, avocado, cilantro and yumminess.

The problem with this recipe is that it uses like a tablespoon of plain yogurt.  And plain yogurt only comes in those giant one litre containers - so then you're stuck with a ton of gross, unflavored yogurt in your fridge for a month, until you decide to throw it away... or until this happens:

Let me tell you - that ess was C-O-L-D!

Anyway, next meal....  another friend of ours, Tanya, is also leaving us to move to Saskatoon.  Before that, she was off to Thailand to have an amazing elephant farming (herding?) experience.  We were told that her favourite foods were bacon, cheese and bread.  So we decided to make a meal centered around bacon:

(well, not the salad, cause come on - something had to have no bacon in it).  But the chicken was stuffed with goat cheese and bacon and the little puffs are from this recipe.  You MUST STOP EVERYTHING YOU'RE DOING AND MAKE THESE RIGHT NOW!

For dessert, we had chocolate bread pudding with bacon-infused creme anglaise.  No bigs.  We got the idea (and recipe) from watching an episode of Bobby Flay's Throwdown at my sister's house.  The bread pudding was great - but the chocolate overpowered the bacon in the custard.  Such is life.

Last meal.  Kathryn invited a new friend, Taylene over for dinner.  We decided to try a new recipe for pork loin (read wang) with a cherry salsa on it.  Ok.  So.  Cherries aren't in season anymore.  I experimented by buying dried cherries and soaking them in water overnight.  They puffed up, but looked kind of nasty, so I decided that I needed to cook them up in a Port reduction.  Yeah, that was awesome!  The recipe came from Bon Appetit magazine, which my sister Janine gave me as a gift.  To compliment, we had domino potatoes, which is basically roasted potatoes with bay leaves, but cut into little squares like dominos.  They were seriously delish and super easy peasy.  Basically just rub the pan with butter, put the potatoes in, put bayleaves in, season, top with melted butter and bake until done.

Also, we had spinach and goat cheese souffles.  We didn't have enough little ramekins, so I decided to make them in cappuccino cups.  I was super nervous that they wouldn't rise and I forbid anyone from opening the oven.  Luckily, they turned out great:

For dessert, angel food cake (store bought, cuz really - have you ever made an angel food cake from scratch?  It takes, like, a whole carton of eggs).

Ok.  Caught up!

Bonus:  Strawberries