Sunday, April 26, 2009

okay food, wonderful weekend

So, I made two more recipes this weekend. Neither was fantastic, but this was not Paula's fault either. I made "Easy Rolls", which did seem as promised to be quite easy - only I over beat and under baked them.

Also made "Oriental Marinade", which consists of soy sauce, ginger, garlic, water, and a little sugar. It smelled amazing, the only real problem was that I may have burned the chicken a little. So, the flavor was a little masked by burned chicken bits. It was, at least, very juicy.

I realize that all of my posts so far have really involved food errors.. generally my food does turn out well, I promise!

I also used the rest of last weekend's barbecue sauce to make some beef short ribs in the crock pot, they were delicious!!

I probably wasn't totally focused on cooking this weekend because of all the activities, which I think I mentioned on Friday. The Festival of Books was this weekend, Travis and I went yesterday. I went to a cooking demonstration by the authors of L.A's Original Farmers Market Cookbook and The Santa Monica Farmers' Market Cookbook. It was really interesting, and I bought a copy of the Original Farmers Market Cookbook. I've been looking through it all weekend, and it is amazing.

I also stopped by Dan Goodsell's Mr. Toast booth. This is clearly also sort of food-related, but please please do not eat Mr. Toast. I first saw Dan Goodsell's work at Wizard World Los Angeles shortly after we moved to L.A. in 2005 or so. I had only $5 cash, and he was nice enough to let me buy $6 worth of merchandise with it. This year, there were significantly more people at his booth than I remember from previous years, and I've also seen Mr. Toast plush pop up at Urban Outfitters. Check it out, seriously!

Friday, April 24, 2009

not a big day

This really isn't the biggest item ever, but I did get to check one more thing off in the cookbook today! Took the day off work but ended up spending most of the day running errands.

I made Lemon Butter for fish, which is exactly what it sounds like: lemon juice and butter with some garlic, salt/pepper, and a dash of Worcestershire sauce. Poured it over some tilapia that I had broiled.

I'm really too scatterbrained to cook. As the fish had about a minute left to broil, I realized I had not made anything to eat with the fish, other than lemon butter. So, I just threw some sourdough bread in the toaster and had fish and toast for dinner. Not too shabby.

Maybe later I'll continue on a lemon theme and finish up last weekend's cheesecake.

This probably won't be a big cooking weekend, it's awfully packed with activities. Tomorrow is the Festival of Books a UCLA, and Sunday we're going to Hollywood to see Earth at the El Capitan. We'll probably have lunch at the Disney Soda Fountain too, yum! That's all for now.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

BBQ and Tackling Dessert

It was a pretty big cooking weekend. I really should have spent some of the cooking time cleaning, but whatever.

New recipes included:

Ham and Bean Soup
Pulled Pork
The Lady's Barbecue Sauce
Cheesecake

All were pretty delicious, but only the sauce and cheesecake were from Paula Deen.

The Ham and Bean Soup was made in a crock pot with the bone and some meat from last weekend's Easter ham plus some navy beans.

Travis was a huge fan of the pulled pork, which really only involved rubbing seasoning all over a pork shoulder, wrapping it in foil, and baking it for about 5 hours. My favorite part about the meal was the Lady's Barbecue Sauce. It was vinegary, my favorite kind!

I nearly ruined the cheesecake with ingredient replacement. It is still tasty, but it's really not attractive at all. There is actually a hole in the middle from an accident while pouring on topping. Pouring? Yes, pouring.

I decided to replace sour cream with buttermilk and butter, because I was out of sour cream. But, I didn't have buttermilk either, so I used the trick of adding vinegar to milk and letting it stand. Genius, right? Not quite. With sour cream, the mix would have been thicker and spread onto the baked filling.

My mix just poured. And it bored a hole through the center of the cheesecake. Plus, it was still liquid after it baked. So, I just poured it off. Hence, the not lovely but still tasty cheesecake. I think one of the biggest factors in the tastiness may have been that I was also out of vanilla extract, so I replaced it with lemon extract. So, we'll call this weekend 1-1 with impromptu ingredient substitutions. Oh well, can't win them all I guess!

New Blog!

So, this is the beginning of my new blog, Michele's Delicious Life. My plan is to chronicle the cooking adventures I have. I am currently attempting to make all the recipes in Paula Deen's first cookbook. This is almost always delicious, but it has it's share of missteps as well. Hopefully it will be as interesting for you as it is for me.