Noodle Pudding

Tomorrow night we are doing a Rosh HaShanah holiday dinner for 12 guests at our home restaurant. The menu will incorporate some traditional dishes and some traditional ingredients prepared non traditionally. Which brings me to dessert. I had a request for kugel which can be either sweet or savory and have a potato or egg noodle base. A loose translation for kugel is pudding or casserole.

I started thinking about making a sweet kugel for the dessert. Which evolved into the idea of a creme brulee with noodles and fruit. I thought about how good noodles would be in a custard and then crisped on top with a blow torch. Dessert kugels that I have eaten always had fresh or dried fruit incorporated in them. I found the first quinces of the season at a market this week and immediately knew they would be part of the pudding. Our fig picking has slowed down considerably but there are still some figs we can gather each day and I thought they would go well with the other ingredients. We bought some beautiful eggs from Whitmore Farms and John made me a beautiful batch of egg fettucini. I pulled out an old recipe from Rupperts for a traditional creme brulee custard. I filled brulee cups with fettucini, topped the noodles with shaved and roasted quince and slices of fresh fig and topped them with custard. I baked them slowly in the oven to set up and then refrigerated them. Before serving I will sprinkle them with sugar and take a blow torch to the top of them to crate a crispy sugar crust.

I like the idea so much I made it last night for a dinner and will make it again for tomorrow nights dinner. When I was explaining the dessert to the diners last nite one guest said to me that he had just had a fettucini dessert the night before...I got excited and asked where...alas he was only joking!