Ooops!

Okay, I know...I'm really bad at blogging!

I really had good intentions of keeping this up, but I stopped around the time something I like to refer to as the "shit storm of 2012".  The Shit Storm of 2012 began around the beginning of last November where I found myself stretched to my ends in preparing, planning and executing many important events at work in a fairly short period of time.  First there was our Strategic Planning, then the Citywide Kids Christmas Party, then the Citywide National Planning, and ending with out own Christmas Party.  After these events I then prepared all of our 2013 Planning and Budget materials just in time to go home for Christmas.  During this time I'm not even sure I ate, let alone cooked...and blogged.

But I digress.  I have been very busy in the kitchen recently!  I ended the last year really well with an amazing and courageous meal.  Steve and I planned our Christmas celebration for the day of my birthday as he worked Christmas Eve and I took off on a jet plane early on Christmas day to spend some time with family.  For this meal I decided to make Beef Wellington, scalloped potatoes, and green beans.  Now beef wellington is a pretty big-time recipe.  It pretty well took me all day to make.  Basically it is an amazing cut of beef that is braised, wrapped in prosciutto and mushrooms, wrapped in puff pastry and baked in the oven.

Exhibit A.  The prosciutto and mushroom mixture.  I wish I had a blender as in the original recipe the mushroom mixture is supposed to be a paste like substance that sort of acts like a flavour glue to hold the meat in place.

Exhibit B.  The meat, which was braised first (although in retrospect I should have braised it a bit longer as the piece of meat was a bit bigger than the recipe called for), brushed with mustard, wrapped in the mushroom/ham blanket and chilled.  After it was chilled, I rolled out the puff pastry and wrapped the meat into it.  Side note, I had to improvise a little as this was the first time I noticed we do not have a rolling pin.  Fortunately I was drinking beer at the time and used an empty (cleaned out) bottle to roll out the dough.  After the meat was wrapped in the dough, it chilled again, brushed it with an egg wash and cooked in the oven.

AND TA-DAH!  The finished product.  Now I didn't take a picture of the inside for two reasons.  One because the middle of it was very very rare.  But I was nervous that it would burn or dry out so the middle pieces got nuked a bit afterwards.  The second reason was because unlike the Gordon Ramsey version, once we cut through it all the layers fell apart.  But it was absolutely the best thing I've ever made.  All the flavours were mouth watering!

During the time I was waiting for the wellington to sit or chill for many hours, I made Scalloped Potatoes from scratch.  A process which I thought would be very challenging was not at all, and quite delicious.  Though I must confess once these were done I was not in the mood to try the green bean with vinaigrette recipe.  So we had some canned peas instead.  Still though it was a very impressive meal.  Topped off with apple pie and ice cream for my "birthday cake" it was a very good meal.

Since the new year I have cooked a lot of new recipes.  Most of them working out really well.  We've had chili, taco soup, chicken enchiladas, black bean beef stir fry, pork lo mien, chicken parmesan, and much more.  Another thing that I am doing more often is baking, as we find it is so much less expensive to make as much from scratch as possible.

So my new goal for 2013 is to try out 100 new recipes and blog about it.  I'm about 15 in to my goal so far and the results have been great.  Stay tuned...for real this time I promise!!

Leftovers

This is what I had for lunch today...

DELICIOUS!! 

And this is what I used to have for lunch before I started my cooking challenge...

I know it's terrible, I never used to eat lunch.  For a while I was eating yogurt, berries, granola bars etc. But I would mostly be too lazy either the night before or the morning of to put anything together.  So I'd justify and say, I'll just get something at work.  Except for that I wouldn't.  I'd justify again, I don't want to leave work because I'm in the middle of something so I'll leave early and get something on the way home.  Except I wouldn't until around 5:30pm cranky with a headache I'd go to the Starbucks drive-through and get an overly priced yet delicious latte and a piece of their lemon poppy seed loaf.  Super healthy!

I really think that this unhealthiness was adding to my stress at work, although there are many other factors.  But for a while their I was really miserable, so much so that one of my co-workers kept asking where the "old-Meghan" was.  Eating throughout the day has definitely helped bring back the real me!

Therefore leftovers are amazing.  Except for the fact that I'm finding I have too much leftovers.  Did you ever notice that recipes that are for two people don't make enough (no leftovers) and the others make way too much??  Seriously, if you like what you see above please come and open my fridge.  There is about half a 9x13 pan of this stuff in the fridge!!

Completely unrelated side note:
Today at work I had a hilarious conversation with someone.  We were discussing the can/bottle donation we have in our lunchroom and how the charity wasn't making a whole lot of money.  For whatever reason that made me think of pop can tabs.  You see in elementary school there was regularly a drive for pop can tabs to be used in raising money for wheelchairs for under privileged children.   This thought prompted me to ask my co-worker if they ever had this same thing...before he could answer I wondered.  How do they make wheelchairs out of pop tabs?  And how many does it take?  It was then explained to me that the pop tabs are sold because they are aluminum and they money from the sale is used to BUY a wheelchair.  Mind blown! 

It was a hectic week that is for sure.  The kind of week that the last thing you feel like doing after sitting on the Deerfoot for 2 hours is cooking, just so you can eat at 8pm.  Did I mention that we were dumped with a massive snowfall?  Well I did successfully try out two new dishes however 2/5 recipes isn't exactly what my goal was.  Anyways, the two dishes were great hits!

On to the first, Tortellini with Pumpkin Alfredo Sauce.  This recipe was courtesy of the Food Network and was super easy and super delicious.  I was a bit skeptical about the pumpkin part, not about me but more concerning with Steve.  He's pretty funny about some food, like the other day I said I was going to make quiche, and he let me know he didn't like quiche.  I asked had he tried it... "no, but I don't like it" so I made it anyways and guess what he liked it!  So I knew that if I told him there was pumpkin in this recipe he wouldn't give it a chance.  I tried desperately to hide it, but unfortunately just as I was about to add it to the sauce he walked in the kitchen.  Busted!!  This was around the same time I burned my hand.  Here's a tip, when putting a heavy substance into a pot of hot butter, don't use your fingers to scoop it out of the measuring cup!!  Ouch!  (Just add it to the list of stupid judgement calls!)

Anyways the mix of pumpkin, Parmesan cheese, shallots and nutmeg, among other things were a great combination.  The house smelled amazing and the outcome was great.  Although Steve decided it looked like "cat barf", which in his defence it kind of did.  But a definite make again recipe.

Secondly I tried, The Best Ever Meatloaf from Chatelaine Magazine.  Again not a hard thing to make but a great dish.  Great flavours but the best part of it was the glaze.  Who knew a mix of tomato paste, mustard, hot sauce and brown sugar would make such an amazing sauce!

So I was 2 for 2 this week.  This weekend I'm taking on the challenge of Chicken Enchiladas and BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwiches.

Happy Cooking!

The Exploding Brown Sugar Incident

The exploding brown sugar incident was something that happened by a stupid judgement call and genetics.  Seriously...my family has a history of blowing things up in the kitchen.

First there was the Egg Debacle.  One day my dad decided to hard boil a couple of eggs on the stove and walked away, got distracted and completely forgot.  I was not in the room at the time, but remember a very loud BOOM.  We all rushed to the kitchen and found egg everywhere.  Seriously, on the counter, the cabinets and even the ceiling.  Then there was the Snake Explosion.  Not a real snake, that's just the nickname we call a Magic Bag.  Again my dad, put the snake in the microwave like any other day and put it on for 2 minutes, except 2 minutes was actually typed in as 2 hours.  Oops!  Now I wasn't home that day so I did not witness the explosion, but I do remember coming home to find the microwave on the deck outside in the snow.

So yes, I claim that my explosion has something to do with genetics but it has more to do with really bad judgement.  I make really stupid judgement calls in the kitchen.  Like the time I used wax paper to line a cookie sheet and put in the hot oven.  I was originally looking for Parchment paper and when I couldn't find any I thought "wax paper is the same right?  I mean there's a picture of chocolate chip cookies sitting on wax paper on the box; it's got to work the same right?" WRONG!  Steve ended up saving the day on that one!

This time I was baking Toffee Chocolate Bars, a recipe that calls for brown sugar.  Now I knew we had some brown sugar in the pantry from a while ago however I found the sugar completely hardened as I not stored it properly.  Sigh, I knew I had a couple options.  First I put it in a shopping bag and hit it with a rolling pin - but that didn't work.  So I called on my good friend Google (what would we do without the Internet!!) who told me that if I put the hardened brown sugar in the microwave with a bowl of water and nuked it for a minute at a time the sugar would loosen.  The warning though was to absolutely only cook it for a minute at a time.  Well I did the minute at a time thing about 4 times until things started to loosen and then I had a thought.  Surely the person who wrote this wasn't trying to soften such a large piece of hardened sugar...and here is where I made my judgement call.  I'll just put this in for 3 minutes.  Well at about 45 seconds left to go I heard several crackles and a very loud popping sound.  As I carefully opened the microwave door I discovered that not only had the water in the bowl boiled over but half of the brown sugar cooked to a molasses like substance and stuck to the plate AND the rest of it had completely burst all over the microwave.

Moral of the story, follow directions especially if there is a warning!!

Fortunately, the bars turned out just fine!

A New Beginning...

Hey, remember when I started a wedding blog?  Oh yeah, the one where I wrote 3 posts and abandoned, now I remember!  Well I've started a new project and this time it's going to be different...seriously!

Steve and I have been together five years before we got married and have lived together for four of those years.  During that time, I can say honestly that cooking was not my cup of tea.  It worked out really well for a while as Steve got home hours before I did and he wouldn't want to wait on supper so he would assume most cooking responsibilities.  Steve often joked that I wasn't doing my "womanly duties" and I would joke back that I was a "modern woman", who used my brain to think at work, the last thing I would want to think about after a long day was what's for supper.  Although I knew Steve was joking, I really was never motivated to cook (or clean for that matter) out of some "obligation" based on the stereotype of women.  Our arrangement worked for a while until I found we were eating out more and more (cha-ching$$) and arguing long into the evening about "what's for supper?".

Since we've been married, we've received many things from our amazing family and friends to use in the kitchen.  Yes the shiny pots and pans were exciting but I didn't start to feel the motivation to cook until I received a Newlywed Cook Book from my pal Zoe.  I took a couple days and read through the book and decided, I was going to learn how to cook.

Not that I didn't know how to cook, let's be honest.  I know my way around a kitchen but in the very basic sense.  Most of my meals previously have been pasta, meat and potatoes, stir-fry etc.  Meals that weren't very inspiring, just your basic meat and a couple sides.  Nothing that took much effort or thought.  However, about a week ago I decided to branch out and cook all new recipes and that my friends is how I started this project.

So my goal is to cook five to six nights of the week, new recipes and really challenge myself.  Sharing my stories, kitchen emergencies (stayed tuned for the exploding brown sugar post!) and great recipes.