Share your recipes/ideas!

Last night, my friend Steph posted a recipe on my Facebook wall.  It looks amazing and I really want to try it.  And Joan had the excellent idea that we should exchange some cookbooks and try different recipes.


Do you have a favorite recipe to share with me?  Cookbooks you love and that I should put on my wish list for that future date when I will have run through my stash?

Share them in the comments section on this thread!

#2 - Shroom OD

So Sunday night Joan and I had a Golden Globes viewing party.  We started with some bubbly and baked brie with fig & ginger jam.  Normally this is where I would take a photo of the glorious brie wheel and tag my cousin Becky, but there were no survivors (and I forgot to do it ahead of time).

I made Jacques' Savory Stuffed Roast Chicken from Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home.  Not a new recipe, but this has been my tried and true favorite way to roast a chicken for a few years now.  Stuffing the shallot and herb mixture under the skin makes the chicken so incredibly tasty!  Since I discovered that recipe, I've not been able to resist stuffing something under the skin of the chicken whenever I roast one.

This meal would not count without a new recipe, so to accompany the chicken I made Asparagus with Morels from Barbara Kafka's Vegetable Love.  It sounded amazing, but truth be told the morels were overpowering and I felt like I had way more liquid than I needed.  I would definitely try this again, but would probably cut the morels in half, and maybe the liquid too.  The morels should probably be smaller too, as the texture just didn't jive well with the asparagus.  I really wanted to love this recipe because I love her soup cookbook, love asparagus & mushrooms, but it just didn't translate well for me.

Something else that evidently didn't translate well - Ricky Gervais' hosting job on the GGs.  Heard a lot of criticism today, but he did a great job of sticking it to the celebrities who are used to having their egos stroked.  On a day like today, when we should be remembering the legacy of Dr. King, the criticism seems overblown.  Yes, some of his jokes crossed the line, but we still have much larger battles to fight than the hurt feelings of a few celebrities.  So many injustices left to correct here in America and throughout the world, and in the words of Dr. King: 

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

#1 - And so it begins...

The idea for this blog came out of a jumble of things... a significant life change, a love of cooking, an overabundance of cookbooks and random recipes, and of course Julie and Julia.

I recently transitioned from cooking for two to cooking for one,  and as a result I've found myself eating some really dull stuff because it's easy to prepare (or pick up).  Turkey burgers, grilled chicken breasts, take-out, blah.  Over the years, I also have accumulated -- in technical terms -- a crapload of cookbooks and recipes.

Today I relentlessly pruned my cookbook stash and made a deal with myself that for each cookbook retained, I would need to commit to cooking at least one recipe this year or it would wind up in the Goodwill pile next year.  I also have a bajillion recipes cut out of various food magazines, and many of them have yet to be tried.   I don't have the intestinal fortitude to commit myself to one cookbook for an entire year a la Julie, and my crazy collection of cookbooks have many, many recipes that I'm really not up for attempting.    I've also seen a few blog posts about committing to reading 52 books in 52 weeks, but frankly, that seems like too much commitment for this point in my life.

First, I decided I would keep a list of the recipes I tried on the fridge... then contemplated putting the list on Facebook so that I could share with others... then decided, "What the f***, I might as well try blogging about them!"  If I don't submit myself to public shaming/ridicule, I'll inevitably slack off.  The only rule is that it can't be a recipe I've tried before.  It can be a dish I've made previously, but in order to count towards 52 it needs to be a recipe from a cookbook or magazine that I haven't tried yet.

So here goes, #1 for 2011 is Steak au Poivre from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything.  I was really in the mood for a steak and Bittman's cookbook has become my go-to first stop any time I'm looking for a jumping off point.  I can't resist the urge to meddle, so I added mushrooms, some Penzey's Shallot Pepper that my friend Joan gave me, and a dash of Tuscan Herb olive oil that was a Christmas gift from Nana.  It was delicious.  I would love to make it again, but given my imperative it might be a while before I can get back to this one.