Happy New Year! It’s hard to believe so much time has passed and another year has flown by. 2024 seems like a blur at this point and personally I’m happy to leave it behind and start fresh.
I’m hoping for a wonderful year ahead filled with more personal growth, love and happiness with my family, dear friends and all of you.
Wishing everyone all the very best for a year filled with hope, love, good memories and close bonds with those we love. I hope to be more present online and get back to my blog and YouTube channel. I have greatly missed being on my platforms and interacting with you all. I’ve been going through a lot of personal issues in my life…divorce is incredibly difficult emotionally and physically draining. But I hope the worst is over and I’m enthusiastic for a fabulous year ahead. I feel like 2025 is going to be my year 🙂
So I want to start off this year with a special treat for my readers and followers! As many of you know, my dad who passed a few years ago was a French Chef. And a really good one, I might add! For a while now, I’ve had a box of Dad’s recipes packed away moving with me house to house.
Over the holidays, my daughter encouraged me to get the box out and look through all the recipes. She wanted to gift her cousin, my niece with a recipe book for Christmas. I thought what a fabulous idea! So we got to work. We spent countless hours, going through hundreds of pages, sorting the recipes, and sneezing a lot from the dusty papers… It was a great bonding experience with my kids and we talked about Dad and his love for cooking and food.
Our many hours of work paid off and we created 4 recipe book to treasure forever and pass down to each generation. My daughter created the cover and spines for the folders and we were so pleased with the final result. I’m so happy to have these family recipes typed on paper, yes with an old school typewrite with spelling errors and all. Remember back in the day, using white out to correct an error on paper? I have many originals and will treasure them.
Today January 1, to start off the year right, I made the first one of Dad’s french dishes. I have dreamed about this dessert for many years now and even tried to find a recipe similar to it but none of them came close to Dad’s Blueberry Flan that he made for our family when I was young. As I’m looking through all the papers, I was hoping and praying the Flan recipe was included and I was so thrilled to find it! Typed up on a piece of paper in the 1970’s, Dad taught cooking classes for the Culinary Institute and he shared this delicious recipe with his students.
If you love blueberries, you will adore this tart and tasty treat.
Baking for 40 minutes produced a well cooked flan with a brownish crust.
I thoroughly enjoyed each bite with my kids as it brought back so many memories from my childhood. Hoping you will enjoy it as much as I do and more than my kids did 😂 Blueberries are not on their top list of tasty fruits but adding a scoop of vanilla ice cream made it edible for them and even more delish for me.
As with so many of Dad’s french recipes, alcohol of some type was usually added especially to the desserts. I did not add the rum when I made this one, but is an option I included if you so desire.
Hoping to share more of Dad’s french recipes with you in the future and thinking about maybe even publishing a cookbook one day! What do you think about that idea? 
How to Make a French Blueberry Flan – Recipe
Love Denise
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Denise, Wishing you the Best Year everin 2025❤️ A cookbook is a great idea! Didn’t know your Dad was a French Chef..wow. Looking forward seeing more blogs from you.
Hi Nancy, happy new year to you too! That must be where I get my love for cooking which my son also haves now too 🙂 Always nice to hear from you, hope you’re doing well.