roasted potatoes

....with olive oil and a little bit of thyme. Mmmmmm. :)

What, cottage cheese now?

I had cottage cheese for breakfast! This is another first food for me. I'm doing quite well at widening my food horizons! And I have to admit, it didn't taste like what I expected it to. I had it with cinnamon-sprinkled peaches. I might even make it a regular breakfast. :)

I ate a shrimp

I thought about eating two. It was really gross for a minute but then I tried not thinking of it as meat, and just concentrated on the cocktail sauce. So I really did swallow it and everything, and I wasn't even sick! I have to say that MAYBE I could eat more in the future. I don't think I would pursue it unless they've got some great health benefit though.

a shrimp deferred....

The shrimp will be waiting for tomorrow. But it wasn't my doing! I will post just as soon as I eat it. :)

I wish for....

On the way home tonight I expressed a wish something along these lines:

I am really jealous of places that have meat markets. Where you can just walk up and say "I'm making chicken tonight. Give me some chicken for dinner." And then you get enough for just that night, and the next day you come back and say, "Hi, I'd like some pork tenderloin for two." I really wish I had a place where I could go and get fresh meat just like that.


Later on, Alex and I were at Hannaford and lo, there was a meat counter! They had a bunch of fresh cuts of meat laid out, some seasoned for you with fascinating things like mango chutney. And then a little way down the back wall of the store, there was a fish counter with fresh cuts of fish, clams, etc.

This is my newest delight in the cooking world. The whole point is that the meat is FRESH! :)

seafood, ahoy!

Tonight I will eat at least one shrimp. All the way down the hatch. No spittings-out allowed. I have mixed feelings about this. :P

Discovery!

Cool Whip makes the best mousse. You have to not mind the fact that nobody (at least not me) knows what Cool Whip is. But it makes a delicious, fluffy, delicious mousse that lacks some of the bitter chocolatey-ness that my earlier attempt had.

Ultimately I guess it depends on one's mood on the particular day. But I am now resolved that I need to figure out how to get that light flavor out of regular whipping cream and chocolate.

my mommie

I just want to take a moment to appreciate an aspect of my mom's parenting style. She ALWAYS let us help out when she was cooking things. I was probably three years old and already stirring pots and adding ingredients to things.

And thus, this morning I realized that I had too many eggs. Hmm.... what would mom do? I made a quiche. Which was ridiculously easy because I've been helping out on them for at least ten years. :)

new project

I am on a mission to find something chocolatey, delicious AND healthy for my mommie. More on this later. :)

cooking with espresso?

This goes on the Starbucks blog due to the espresso and the cooking blog due to the creative inspiration:

The espresso machines at work just got fixed so they pull really REALLY good shots, so I was thinking of making mousse or something with espresso added. Peter, one of the store's regulars, was there while I was tasting the newly repaired shots, and he told me that you can actually use espresso in soups, to marinade meats, in virtually every dessert dish thought of by man, and so on. I will have to start experimenting!

kitchen scale

Chris and I traded digital kitchen scales for Christmas. It was a very awesome present for her to have gotten for me! Today I weighed another awesome present (the giant bricks of chocolate that Alison got for me) and discovered that I have nearly a kilogram! Put another way, I have a pound and a half of chocolate --and that's with some already having been eaten.

*happy happy happy*

:D

I bought a vanilla bean

What shall I do with it??

vanilla beans

Tomorrow I go on a quest to the natural foods store to see whether they carry inexpensive vanilla beans. Woo! :)

branching out already

Last night I ate a crab puff or something like that. It was a crispy pastry with a crab/cream cheese mix inside and I ate the Whole Thing! I even liked it. I'm proud of myself. :)

a new drink?

Okay, I am not very well-informed about the world of liquor and mixed drinks. Someone has probably come up with this before me and it probably has a dazzlingly clever name already.

With that said: I made up a new (to me) drink! I like margaritas but I don't put that much tequila in them. I am a lightweight, for sure. So I don't care about having a ton of liquor, I just like the flavor. SO I took a Mike's hard lime-ade and threw it over ice with just a splash of tequila. The whole inspiration was that I was too lazy to bother with doing the drink mix, salt, etc..

It turns out it was DELICIOUS. I'm calling it the Lazy Margarita. :)