Between the Holidays

I am just now recovering from having our family together for 5 days at Thanksgiving. It was the greatest time ever, but I didn't realize how much we did together until after they left and I actually had to try to work. I don't even remember last week, or if I cooked anything at all. It's all a blur.
We had some great meals together, and experienced good food all over the DC area. This one picture is of a crab feast at a place called Cantler's Riverside Inn, in Annapolis. It was so good. At home we cooked twice, once was a meal prepared by daughter # 1, chicken with cheese and sage, then tacos prepared by yours truly and daughter #2. Daughters #3 and #4 did loads of work to get ready for the Thanksgiving feast. We had fried turkey (very good ) and all the normal stuff-mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry relish, cranberry bread, asparagus, carrots, rolls, and dessert was cheesecake and pumpkin pie. I'm getting full just thinking about all that food.

Here it is about a week and a half after Thanksgiving and I still don't want to do anything in the kitchen. Last night we had waffles for dinner! Tonight I made a salad and muffins (a tried and true meal). Oh, I forgot that on Sunday, I made chicken with wild rice soup. It was different. I liked it, but don't think I'd make it again. Since the weather has become quite cold, it's great to be making soup again.

Hopefully I'll have the energy to continue cooking something interesting over the next month.
Until next time.....

Disaster!

To me my last meal was a disaster, just because it was a lot of work and then tasted awful.

I tried to make clam chowder. I love clam chowder. The best that I have ever had is from a small cafe called Boudin's Bakery in California.http://boudinbakery.com/Their chowder is much better than any I've had in Massachusetts, which is supposedly the home of clam chowder.

Being as Ina is from Mass. I thought her clam chowder would be great-and it probably is. But..once again, ingredients were difficult for me to find. One review of her books said that all of her ingredients are easy to find, and she even says that many recipes are of things you probably have in your cupboard. Well, my cupboard has no fresh spices lingering around, and when I do buy them, they go bad before I can use them in a second recipe, and they are expensive. Those who know me, know I cannot possibly grow my herbs. I have the blackest thumb there is.

Anyway, the recipe called for fresh clams-couldn't find, so I bought frozen ones, and I couldn't find clam juice, but found clam broth which said "use wherever a recipe calls for clam juice."

I did everything else according to the recipe, it thickened up nicely and looked great, but the taste....well, it was too fishy and very blah. When I was cutting up the frozen clams into tiny bits, I got nervous that we were all going to get food poisoning. They looked really strange, with black spots on them and with some weird stuff on the inside. I got very grossed out. I was wishing I had bought canned clams where someone else had done all the cutting. I looked at the clam package and saw that they were from Vietnam, and I must say, that really gave me a fright. I hope we don't all have mercury poisoning.
Since that meal, I have not tried another Barefoot Contessa recipe. I've once again resorted to some standbys-even going so low as to cook hot dogs. There's a really old song that my parents used to sing to me that I should sing to myself in the midst of this. Some of the words go like this:
"Pick yourself up,
Dust yourself off,
And start all over again!"
As this new week progresses, I will try, try again to get excited about cooking some new and interesting meals.
PS: No one got food poisoning!

Quick meals

On page 114 of Barefoot Contessa at Home, it says, "Everyone needs a few dishes they can assemble ten minutes after they walk in the door at night." This quote proceeds the very tasty "Chicken with goat cheese and basil" recipe. As I entered the door one night last week, I was greeted with laments of ,"Where have you been?","I'm leaving in 5 minutes." "I'm running errands, when do I come back." and various other comments. I was once again tired, and my brain was totally foggy from the long drive or something. I know I had a deer in the headlights look about me. In spite of that, I managed to get this meal together in about 10 minutes, (fortunately the chicken was already defrosted), we all ate, and everyone went on their merry way.

The next night was another quick meal-but one I have tried before. I had a meeting late in the afternoon, so knew there would not be a lot of time to prepare anything. I once again made blue cheese burgers. I am amazed that I have never tried blue cheese on a hamburger before. It is really delicious.

I must confess, I have been able to try new recipes once and awhile, but some nights I still resort to grilled cheese and tomato soup. I figure at least there is food on the table and that must count for something!

In another life...

If I believed in reincarnation, I would like to come back as a person of the female gender again, but I would like to be one that has servants. (I think most of us agree that would be great). I still would like to cook, but I want someone to do all the grocery shopping, all the preparation for cooking, and all the clean up after we eat!! Just think of how easy it is for chefs to prepare their meals on the cooking shows. First of all, the kitchen is huge-loads of counter space. Secondly, everything is cut up ever so neatly, and perfectly placed in cute little bowls. The cook just puts the meal together, and voila! it comes out of the oven, also looking perfect.

Why am I waxing eloquent on the joys of someone else preparing the preparations?? Because I made Filet of Beef Bourguignon. (Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, p. 123) It's a favorite of Ina's. She used to make the famous one of Julia Child's. This, she says, is much faster, and fresher tasting.

In this tasty dish is beef (obviously) carrots, mushrooms and pearl onions. All of the above had to be cut up, sauted, strained and then put together once again. The carrots and onions were cooked in a wine sauce for about 20 minutes, after which I added the previously sauted beef and some already cooked bacon. See? Had someone else done all that cutting, dicing and saute-ing, it would have been easy to make. There was loads of clean up too. I almost took a picture of my kitchen after I had been cooking, but I was much too embarrassed. It looked like it had been hit by a tornado!

In spite of all this work, this dish is WONDERFUL!!! The entire family really liked it. I made potatoes to go with it, as well as a salad and bought some really good crusty bread.

My only real question is this. There is a picture of this Beef Burguignon in the BC cookbook and the carrots as well as the onions look orange and white. My carrots and onions took on a rather purple hue because they were cooked in wine for 20 minutes. I didn't end up with as much sauce as in her picture either. What's the deal with that?

All in all, I would recommend making this meal. It's a keeper in my book.

Really tired today!!

I had the day off of work, and am more tired than on days that I work! Cleaning house is exhausting and boring. I'm really sick of laundry, and we have so many stairs in this house!!!
Anyway, because I was home all day, I made a roast chicken, according to Ina-it's her husband's favorite meal. It was good. But when I started to carve it, I realized I had cooked it upside down! I make roast chicken about once a year, so I think that is why. The positive side of that is, the breast meat was very moist and tender. Roast chicken is nice to have, but my family will only eat white meat. I eat the dark just because I don't want to waste it. I did not do what my mom always did, save the carcass and then make soup. The leftover chicken bones are actually in the trashcan.
I also made oven roasted vegetables (p.171 in Back to Basics). It was also good, but something in it gave me a huge stomach ache. Maybe I'm just too tired to be eating all this food.
Here is the picture of our dinner. I must say, besides tonight's tummy ache, I have felt a lot better eating fresher homemade food.

Happy eating and cooking.

A failure and a success!

I'm not being totally true to my experiment. This last week I make two dinners that had nothing at all to do with Barefoot Contessa. Actually, that is not quite true. After reading through many of her recipes, I did notice some things she wants to be used as ingredients. Whenever she uses chicken as part of a recipe, she bakes it. And in soup recipes that need stock, she asks for homemade chicken stock. Well, forget the homemade chicken stock. I tried to make chicken soup once in my life, and it was a disaster. I never tried it again. It was a mainstay mean in my growing up years. My mom would make it after a chicken roast, and after Thanksgiving, we had turkey soup practically until the next Thanksgiving. Maybe that's why I don't try too hard to make homemade stock.

So...one evening I was really late so an easy dinner was important. I made my own version of a Cobb salad. Katherine put the chicken in the oven to bake before we shredded it for the salad. It was much better! I usually microwave chicken, but this was moist and tender whereas microwaved is rather tough. So much for convenience. We did make BC blueberry muffins. But the blueberries were frozen and so they colored the entire batter purple. They were still good.

Now that the coolness of fall is approaching, I love to make soup. Tonight I made White Chicken Chili and again baked the chicken first. There are no pictures. We were so hungry we set to it right away and it was gone in short order! I made cornbread which turned out better than any cornbread I've ever made. The reason...the cornmeal was fresh ground from a grist mill here in Maryland. The picture below is of the grist milll with a miller in period costume.

Now I am moving forward to plan for the new and exciting meals of next week.

Worth the Work???

Tonight we had pork tenderloin, homemade applesauce, Parmesan Smashed Potatoes,(these two recipes are in BC Cookbook) and asparagus. I thought the preparation would go really fast since all I had to do with the pork was stick it in the oven, but peeling the apples took forever. I would have done that no matter what, I cannot eat pork without homemade applesauce. Store bought tastes like medicine in comparison. Barefoot Contessa applesauce adds the juice of an orange, as well as zesting the orange. She asks for two oranges, I only put in one, otherwise the orange taste is stronger than the apple taste. The absolute best apples for applesauce are Granny Smith. It was so yummy that I could have eaten the entire bowl. The BC recipe says to bake the applesauce, but I did not have an extra one and a half hours for that, so I cooked it on the stove. I still give it a big thumbs up.

As far as potatoes go, mashed potatoes are great, but so messy and a pain to make after a day of work. I usually make mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving and Christmas, so this was a rare treat indeed. They tasted good-although I couldn't really taste the Parmesan, so they were not anything special. I think I like her buttermilk mashed potato recipe better.

Thanks to anyone who makes comments. I especially like the ones from my delightful daughters!