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This week I've made a curry dish and enchiladas. As usual, I didn't use the called-for ingredients, but got pretty much the same result. Pretty much.

For the curry dish, I had difficulty finding red lentils. None of the lentils at the store looked red. They were reddish greenish and I'm pretty sure they were actually green lentils. But apparently there are several kinds of lentils, so I just grabbed what was available. I had never used fresh ginger before, and was pleasantly surprised by the experience. (The butternut squash residue has left my hands, but I replaced it with the strong smell of ginger for a night.) I had a couple of red potatoes left over from last week, so I used those instead of a russet potato. The only problem was that I didn't cut up the potato into small enough chunks. Next time. I really liked how soggy, for lack of a better word, the carrots got with the curry flavor. For future reference, curry stains things. Like my counter and wooden spoons. Oops.

                                     
    I think I had the most fun putting all my ingredients in little prep bowls that a friend of mine hand painted!

Someday when I am more skilled at baking (ha. ha.) I should learn how to make naan, but for now, it was store bought. I would rate the final dinner at about a 7.5/10. We both enjoyed it and were definitely filled!

                                             So fancy with scallion greens!

Tonight I made basic enchiladas. (Si, se puede!) Unfortunately I don't have any photos of it, but they turned out pretty well. My only disappointment is that the enchilada sauce I bought smelled cheap - like spicy Spaggetti-O sauce. Does anyone know where I can get some nicer enchilada sauce or have a recommendation for how to make my own? What is your favorite ingredient for enchiladas? I had ground beef, black beans and onions in mine! Tasty!

Butternut Squash and Tortellini and ?

Did you know that butternut squash leaves a creepy residue on your hands that can really freak you out before you search "butternut squash residue" online? Neither did I! But I do now and the "F" key on my keyboard is getting infected as I type, even though I have scrubbed my fingers with mineral oil trying to get it off. I didn't notice it until my hands started to dry and my skin felt tight. I thought, like others, that I was having an allergic reaction, and that I wouldn't be able to eat my dinner, but I've had butternut risotto before, so to the interwebs I went! Lo and behold, other people were complaining of the same and offering their advice on how to get rid of the residue, which I still haven't completely done. But this will be a strange reminder in the morning of tonight's dinner.

I picked another recipe from Real Simple and, as usual, modified it to my tastes. I can't stand mushrooms, so I looked up veggies that will cook similarly to mushroom, and decided on broccoli when I couldn't find any similar veggies that I liked. I think it would have worked if the head of broccoli I had was a little fresher. So the broccoli was a bust, in the end, and took away the green from dinner. Sigh.

I did manage to find some gruyere cheese, which was new to me, and probably helped the meal a lot. My squash wasn't quite ripe. How do you pick a ripe squash anyway? I should have asked the internet beforehand. But that just meant I had to cook it a little bit longer, and the flavor wasn't bad. The tortellini turned out just fine, thanks to package directions. Overall, I'd rate this meal as boring. I knew about half way through cooking it that it needed something more, I just didn't know what! So I cracked open a beer and called it lost. But it fed us, and I wasn't too disappointed in what was there, just disappointed in what I should have done, and I still don't know what that is! Any suggestions?

I'd also like to point out that my husband fended for himself for a dinner this week and made this awesome stirfry that I got to have for lunch the next day:

                                             With hoisin sauce!

And, just to make this post worth reading, here's adorable picture of my cat. I think she's smiling, don't you?

                                           Meow! I like food!

A Tale of Two Dinners

So far, I haven't burned anything this week! Hooray! I've also figured out how to use my small stainless steal pan to cook eggs without having a stuck-on, hard-to-clean mess to scrub off. That was actually pretty exciting!

But after Sunday's chorizo-stuffed acorn squash, I had plenty of chorizo left over. But my poor Northern husband is about as welcoming to spice as my cat is to any dog. (That is, she loathes them.) I will give him credit though: after I had smothered the chorizo in sour cream and hidden it with cucumber, tomato, arugula, a tortilla, and more sour cream, he did all right and ate those tacos like a champ. On the other hand, I love spicy food to the point where I have to blow my nose every couple of minutes when we get Thai take out. My native-California self misses Mexican food like crazy, though, so making tacos was probably more of a treat than I realized. I loved the chorizo with the cooling cucumber. I also used dubliner cheese, instead of more traditional cheddar.

(And I may as well state here, that unless otherwise indicated, photo credit goes to my husband, who apparently likes the pre-dinner photo shoots.)

                                            Yum! Tacos!

Tonight, I tried steak with cognac sauce, another recipe I found on Real Simple. I was so excited about this one. I mean, when I hear "any-kind-of-alcohol + sauce," I think, yay! more alcohol! Kidding, but usually, that means it's gonna be something special. Well, maybe I did it wrong, but this sauce had pretty much nothing to it! Maybe an experienced chef would have known that from just looking at the recipe; or maybe it really depends on the cognac you buy; or maybe you really do need heavy cream at 40% milk fat, instead of the 30% milk fat cream that I used. I mean, it could have been anything, but I was pretty disappointed in the flavor - or the lack thereof. The salad was simple and good, and the red potatoes I baked with basil and garlic were also tasty. I think that next time I would make a port-reduction sauce of some kind instead,  hoping for fuller flavor, and I'm determined to go on a sauce recipe hunt! Other than that, I could have cooked the strip steak a bit longer, and perhaps I should try a marinade next time to help keep it a bit more moist.

                                             Pouring the sauce on the steak.

So while this didn't turn out perfectly, isn't that a great picture? Live and learn!

Dinner: Chorizo-stuffed acorn squash

So, I have to give credit where credit is due. Real Simple magazine and their website have more or less saved my first few weeks at home with the new hubby. If you need help, too, check out: http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/recipe-collections-favorites/month-of-dinner-recipes/

When I first picked up the magazine with "Month of Dinners" on its cover, I wasn't really sure what to expect, but I felt deep in my bones that it was going to be important for my up-coming domestic life.

But giving me a list of ingredients is about as good an idea as giving my cat a ball of string. She will probably strangle herself, and I will feel like strangling my husband. After I edited and simplified each of the recipes for the week suggested by Real Simple, taking out ingredients that I don't like, or he doesn't like, or that just sounded too strange, we headed to our local supermarket, where we had to purchase crazy sauces and vinegars (considered "basic" by the magazine) and all the other actual food bits. If the grocer was out of something, I had to improvise on the spot! Can you imagine my fledgling inner chef's mental gymnastics!? This is where I picked out basil instead of the called-for parsley, and instead of cooking collards as a side for one dish, decided artichokes would be more fun.

But on to the chorizo. The recipe called for cured chorizo, chopped. The guy at the meat counter didn't know what cured chorizo was. So we just found some chorizo. Turns out, cured chorizo is hard sausage (I think...still not sure). But I bought regular ground chorizo. And basil. So tonight while I was half-grieving over whether or not we would have something eatable for dinner, hoping I hadn't absentmindedly reset the timer on the acorn squash to cook the bulgur (yea, didn't know what that was until a week ago), and doing the math wrong and putting two times as much cheese in (not that that is a bad thing!), I was in slight panic mode.

But I cooked those acorn squash and Bam! Dinner. 

                                          Hubby approved! Photo credit to him.

You can see the original recipe here. My only real (however accidental) changes were the fresh chorizo (which I cooked through before adding it to the bulgur/cheese mix) and chopped basil instead of parsley.

You're doing it wrong...

A year or two ago, I was at home, attempting to bake something. Probably banana bread. I was chatting online with one of my roommates, who was a work, and who happens to be a whiz at baking (or maybe she just knows how to read a recipe). I can't find the chat in my history, but it went something like this:

me: Ugh, I don't have any baking soda. Do you have any?
her: I dunno, you can check.
me: I don't see any.
me: I'll just use baking powder.
her: what? you can't do that...

This solidified my reputation as the worst baker and cook in the house, and gave my roommates hours of entertainment. I know now that baking is chemistry, so the difference between baking soda and baking powder is a big deal. Incidentally, I'm also terrible at chemistry. I haven't really baked since.

But cooking is more of a necessity, and you can do that pretty minimally. Sometimes all it meant was making a baked sweet potato and calling it a night. I never starved or anything. But I recently got married and I have this other person who will likely starve if I don't make dinner consistently.

Unfortunately for both of us, this requires a bit of work. It means going to the store and buying a full week's worth of ingredients. I know this is, like, normal for people. But then you have to know what to do with the ingredients. And before all of this, you have to look up recipes so you know what to buy and what you're gonna cook. It's like writing an essay where you have to know what your paper is going to say before you write it! Except I like writing essays. 

Again, these are all normal things. I'm just bad at them. I have the unique talent of buying the wrong thing for the recipe, or something slightly different than what the recipe calls for (sometimes this is on purpose, because basil is sorta like parsley, right? *and all the real cooks fainted!*). So then I have these ingredients, but they don't exactly match the recipe. So I improvise. And that's where the adventure really begins.