Checking in from the Land of Enchantment

This week I am in my hometown of Albuquerque, I am here for a week to visit family and help my mother with some household projects. You maybe asking yourself hey, what about the cooking challenge?! No need to fear I am still doing the challenge. I was going to try and do it while in New Mexico but I am not sure if I'll have the time. I promise the second I land back in Cali its on! 

I have to say my first week of the challenge was a lot of of fun! I really enjoyed making new dishes and cooking outside of my comfort zone. I also realized I'd spent too many years not cooking extravagant meals or challenging dishes because I was under the strange belief that I needed a better/bigger kitchen. Silly, I know but that's how I thought. Then it hit me, that nowhere in any recipe does it say, start with a big kitchen. All I really needed was an oven and the ingredients. 

After last week I finally stopped resenting my kitchen and I started to enjoy it. I stopped seeing all the limitations in space and started working with what I had. It was really fun! The moral of the story for me is, instead of waiting to enjoy cooking until I have my dream kitchen. I can enjoy the kitchen I have now and make amazing food. Because really life is happening now! Not sometime in the distant future that may or may not come.

I'll tell you I already miss my little kitchen and I am looking forward to getting back home and getting back to work on my cooking challenge! For now I am going to enjoy much needed time with my family and some awesome New Mexican food!

Saving the best for last

I did it, I completed my third and final recipe for my week of French food. From the beginning I knew that I would have to make boeuf bourguignon during my week of French recipes. I didn't want to start the week with that recipe somehow I just knew it had to be the last recipe. The finale to three days of butter, wine and heavy cream. I will say that it was well worth the wait. This turned out to be hands down my favorite meal of the week. That's saying something considering it was preceded by cheese souffle!

One bite and I was taken back to my first day in Paris, when I had boeuf bourguignon for lunch. 

Even before I had a taste just the smell of it cooking brought back memories of sitting in french bistros and being in Paris. I would say of everything I made this week boeuf bourguignon capture the essence of french food the most for me.

I started with really good bacon four slices and a pound and a half of bottom round beef (grass fed)

I cubed the beef into one inch pieces and roughly chopped the bacon. Then I added the bacon to a hot dutch oven to render the fat.

While the bacon is cooking I chopped a small onion and cleaned and quartered eight ounces of mushrooms.

Once the bacon has browned I remove it from the pan and added the beef to brown on all sides. 

The recipe says to turn the heat up on high and to brown the meat. I would like to say that high heat and bacon grease do not mix. In the course of browning the beef hot grease spattered onto my eye lid and my arms and hands are still recovering from minor splatter burns. So needles to say I turned down the heat which did not help much. The picture below shows my discomfort during the browning process.

Seriously if I had gotten one more grease burn I was ready to call the whole thing off. I calmed down and pushed through. In an effort not to crowd the pan I seared the meat in batches. So once all the meat was browned I added the onions, mushrooms, and beef back to the pot to cook.

This cooks for a couple of minutes until the onions are soft. Then I added three tablespoons of flour and cooked for two more minutes. Now is when I add my favorite ingredient, WINE along with beef stock.

After the wine and beef stock are in. I add a sprig of fresh rosemary, tomato paste and one bay leaf. Then bring the stew to a simmer and put in the oven for an hour and a half.

In the words of Tom Petty "the waiting is the hardest part"! Just put in the oven and wait. I used my time wisely, while it was cooking I proceeded to drink the remaining bottle of burgundy wine and watch old episodes of Breaking Bad with Cory.

Ding! the timer goes off and you think finally dinner is ready! But wait! I still need to add carrots and pearl onions and let the stew cook for another long 30 minutes!

While this was in the oven AGAIN!! I made mash potatoes to serve with this amazing dish. Thirty minutes is up and this what I got!

Really words do not do this justice, the smells coming from this pot were heavenly and worth every minute of waiting in anticipation. Without further ado its time to eat!

There it is, the best dinner I've made since last Thanksgiving! The meat was tender and juicy the sauce was rich and hearty. Some say you can serve this with egg noodles but I think rich creamy mash potatoes are the way to go with dish. It is stick to your ribs good! You have to have a glass of red wine to accompany the meal it brings out all the wonderful depth in the sauce. Cory and I both could not get over how good and satisfying this meal was. Cory said if I made this for him everyday he would be a happy man.

So ladies if there is a man that you are trying to impress I suggest you make this dish for him! I'm telling you this is not a meal he is soon to forget!

In conclusion I am sad to see French week come to an end. I love French food and I had a great time preparing the food of France this week. I will say this, french food takes time, effort, and really good ingredients. I spent a small fortune on cheese this week not mention other ingredients. I don't regret a single penny spent. I had truly soul satisfying food this week, it took me right back to my time in Paris. 

While french food isn't going to be an every night thing, after this week I will definitely add it in to the rotation once in while.  

P.S. When making French food, do not be alarmed by the amount of butter and alcohol in your dishes. This is just how they roll, I am here to tell you the food is all the better for it. So just go it with and enjoy some of the most amazing food of you'll ever eat!

Its getting cheesy around here

French week continues and last night I faced one of my fears souffle. To my surprise it was a lot easier than I thought it would be. The souffle recipe came to me last week in the special French edition of Food&Wine magazine. I knew it was a sign that I had to make this recipe because the magazine arrived the Friday before I was to start my French week challenge.
If you love cheese, like I love cheese then I highly suggest you make a cheese souffle!
Any recipe that starts with buttering a dish and then sprinkling it with Parmesan cheese is a winner in my book!

Next I had to grate the cheese oooh the wonderful yummy cheese! For this recipe I needed Parmesan and a french Comte cheese. Both are reach and nutty with a little tang to them. P.S. get the good quality cheese it makes a huge difference!

Oh and good butter as you can see in the picture, you can't make anything french without butter and this recipe calls for plenty of it. Good think I bought a big block at the beginning of the week. This is only the second recipe and I've used up most of it.
Once I grated the cheese, it was time to separate the eggs.

That's four egg yolks and four egg whites. The next steps are pretty simple. Melt the butter in the pan, then add one clove of garlic whole and six tablespoons of flour and whisk to get out all the lumps.

Now its time to add one cup of milk and whisk until the sauce thickens about 2 mins give or take

Now here is that part that had me a little nervous. Once the sauce is thick you pull it off the heat take out the garlic and add the cheese. You put the whole thing in a the food processor. Blend until smooth then add the egg yolks. The reason this freaked me out is, the sauce is extremely hot and I just knew that if I added the yolks I was going to make cheese scrambled eggs.

To my delight I did not make cheesy scrambled eggs! Woo hoo so far so good this souffle was starting to come together. The thing I had to do was beat the egg whits to soft peaks. Once they were beaten add egg whites to the cheese mixture and fold in gently. The key is gentle because you don't want the egg whites to break down, you want the batter to be nice and fluffy so it will rise and puff when it cooks!

Once the egg whites are Incorporated add the mixture to the prepared baking dish and put in the oven for 30 minutes. This is where I crossed my fingers and prayed that my souffle would rise! I had to hold my self back from peeking in too much I was so excited. Oh and the house smelled like wonderful cheesy goodness. 

After 30 minutes of anticipation this is what I got!

It was beautiful!!! Puffy, brown and light I could not have been happier! At this point I could not wait to eat. Per Food&Wine I paired the souffle with an nice Sparkling wine. Oh and I made a salad just to balance out all that glorious cheese!

Notice that the glass is half full, I may or may not have had some champagne while I was cooking. I made sure to save some to have with dinner. This was a really great meal the souffle for being such a rich cheese dish was light and very easy to eat. I would say it tasted like the best cheezit of your life!

French week is almost at an end I have one more recipe to go. I will miss the food but I am sure my jeans will thank me when I am done loading up on cheese and butter. My next dish is cheese free and I am really excited about it! :)

Bonjour!

My drunk kitchen

I would like to thank my dear friend Kirsten for telling me about this youtube show. Its called my drunk kitchen and it is hilarious! The episode below is about drunk baking and I couldn't stop laughing when I watched this. The best part is she has other episodes with her wasted and cooking. Since I love baking this one is my favorite. Though I've been know to knock back a cocktail or three while baking I've never been this bad (yet).
Enjoy the video!

Ready Set Go! French week has begun

I took a lot of time trying to decide on what would be the first recipe I would make to kick off my around the world challenge. To make things more difficult its French week, which means I had a million wonderful things I could cook. Me being the indcisive person I am I almost went crazy trying to pick a recipe.
Monday morning came and I still hadn't decided what I was going to cook. Then it hit me I had a small Julia Childs book (In Julia's kitchen) so I said why not start there she will have something it is Julia Childs after all. I am so glad I found that little book given to me a long time ago. Because after only few minutes of searching I found it! The recipe the recipe that would kick off this cooking challenge and get the ball rolling on french week.
My very first french dish of the week is drum roll please, French Onion Soup!  I was shocked I hadn't thought of it before now. I love french onion soup and always wanted to make it at home. However I never did because I thought you need to have individual oven proof soup crocks. When I read Julia's recipe she uses a large cassarole dish to layer the toast and cheese. I no longer had any excuses it was time to make soup!
Oh before I forget the best part of this recipe is that it has both brandy and wine in it, for me it was already a winner! So let the soup making being.

I knew I would obviously need onions for onion soup but I was shocked that I would need 2 quarts of onions which comes out to eight cups of sliced onions!

Once I finished slicing onions, it was time to melt butter (you can't have french food without butter) in olive oil. My advice is buy the good imported butter it has a richer taste and gives you that frenchy feel!

Once the butter is melted and the pan is hot add all the onions in. A couple of notes this requires a big sauce pan so break out your biggest pot. Another note it takes about 40 minutes for the onions to carmalize and get a nice golden brown. So if your starving or in a hurry to get dinner on the table this is not the meal you want to make.

This is what the onions look like after 40 minutes of cooking and stiring so they don't stick to the bottom of the pan. Half way through the process I added 1/2 teaspoon of salt and sugar and just continued stiring.
While I was waiting for my onions to carmalize I toasted my french bread and sliced my cheese for the cassarole.

Oh yes there is a lot of cheese in this dish yum!!!!!

Finally the onions are brown! Time to add the Brandy(woo hoo) and wine(double woo hoo) and beef broth. You would think 10 more minutes soup is done, you'd be wrong. I had to let this simmer for thirty more minutes. Once the soup has simmered I then got to layer the bread, soup and cheese into my cassarole dish and put in the oven.
(sorry I didn't photograph this step because by this time I had been working on this soup for almost two hours and I was starving so we are just going to skip ahead to the final product)
After 30 more minutes in the oven this is what I got!

I will say this soup was well worth the time and the effort! With all that warm bubbly cheese and reach onion soup I was in french heaven! Cory said this was his idea of comfort food! He ate so much he made himself sick! I will definitely make this again on a cold rainy day or a lazy sunday afternoon. So there it is dish one of week one. two more french dishes to go this week and 10 more weeks to go after. I am not going to get ahead of myself I am taking it one day at a time. I should go and run off some of that butter, cheese and bread I ate. Who are we kidding I am going to watch the RHOBH instead. :)

Around the world in 80 days

I always say that I want to be more adventurous in the kitchen. Even though I like to cook, I find myself in a food rut. I tend too cook the same recipes over and over. This is in part due to me sticking to my comfort zone, preparing food that I know I can cook well and that wont challenge me.  Well those days are over!

Starting this week I am pushing my self outside of my comfort zone. For the next 11 weeks I will be cooking foods from around the world. The challenges goes like this. Every week I will cook three recipes from a new country. This week is French food! I am hoping this challenge will stretch my culinary skills in the kitchen and make me more comfortable with trying the unfamiliar.

This should be fun (I hope) and for those who live near me come over for dinner! I'll have a ton of food and it will be fun to get the reactions of my friends! So wish me luck as I go around the world cooking new recipes and trying new food!

Cooking up a memory

Some of the earliest food memories I have are with my grandmother. I remember her pulling up a chair to the counter so I could help her bake cookies and me eating a lot of cookie dough. I remember coming home from school to find my all time favorite meal, chili beans on the stove with a side of fried chicken (cause that's how my grandma rolls) and fresh cookies in the cookie jar.

Those beans were and are my comfort food. While other kids craved mac and cheese to feel better on a bad day. I only wanted chili beans and only my grandmothers recipe would do. Now that I am a grown up and live 800 miles away from my grandma I can no longer just call her up to make me a pot whenever I wanted. I tried once a few years ago to make them myself but they weren't the same at all! So I gave up and said the only way I'll have my beloved chili beans again is when I am home for a visit.

That is until yesterday! A couple of weeks ago I decided that I wanted chili beans I needed a taste of home and something to make me feel good. So I called up my grandmother and had her give me the recipe over the phone step by step exactly the way she does it.  I still wasn't sure that they would taste the same because I am sure she has some grandma magic that I don't have, but I decided to give it a whirl anyway.

Yesterday I got up determined to master the art of the chili bean. This dish is not fancy and its certainly not pretty but its good! So let me walk you through my chili bean journey.

First I chopped some onion.

Then add one cup of beans, two cups water, chili powder and onions to my crock pot and set it on high. My grandmother has a pressure cooker and doesn't have to take two and half hours to cook her beans. However I do not own a pressure cooker and I had time, so crock pot it is.

When the beans are almost done cooking. Cook ground beef (preferably grass fed) and chopped onion in a separate pan. Sprinkle two tablespoons of flour over the beef and onions once the beef is cooked through. Then add the beans and the water they were cooking in to the pot with the beef and onions. You can add more chili powdered if you want at this point if its not spicy or not. Then let it cook on low for about 10 minutes.

Vola! you have a piping hot bowl of chili beans. I have to say these were as good as my grandmother. The only thing missing is the fried chicken, which my grandma got on me about not having. I will have to master her fried chicken another day.

Whenever you find yourself homesick or lonely cook up a memory! You'd be amazed at how your favorite home cooked meal can close the gap between those and the ones you love.

Peace out to all my homies!

The night the lights went out in San Diego

Last night San Diego experienced the largest power outage in history. Over six million people were without power for over 12 hours! I was sitting in my living room watching TV when bam everything shut off! The good news is this happened at about 3:30 in the afternoon so I wasn't in the dark. But I was pretty annoyed that I didn't have an TV or internet. Oh and the icing on the cake is that yesterday was one of the hottest days of the week!

Like most things in life its not what happens to you, but how you handle it. Once it was clear that the power was going to be out for while I  decided to make the best of it. Cory and grabed our stock pile of wine and beer (we're always prepared!) and headed to a friends house close by to cookout. It turned out to be a really fun night, no phones, tv's or computers. Just hanging out talking to neighbors and friends. I thought how fun this would be to do this more often.

I was made painfully aware last night that we all myself included lock ourselves away behind our gadgets and TV's and don't really connect with the people around us. I was actually sad when the power came on because it meant we would all go back into our homes and shut ourselves away from the world again. Don't misunderstand me I like having lights and electricity, I was happy to have it back on. I also enjoyed the since of community and sharing that happened during the blackout.

I came to a big revelation, I'd rather be out living my life than watching other people live their lives on television. For those who know me you know that's a huge revelation for me. I am a self proclaimed TV junky! Tonight as Cory and I were settling in on the couch and having our normal what do you want to watch tonight conversation. I grabbed the remote shut off the TV and said "lets go out and do something".

We ended up at the beach people watching then walked around our neighborhood, stopping at a wonderful new restaurant(I'll post about that later) and had a great meal. We didn't do anything that exciting but it was really nice to walk around talk and just enjoy our neighborhood.

For me the blackout was a good thing, an eye opener for me on how much of my own life I'm missing sitting in front of the TV. I am not saying I am off TV cold turkey I haven't lost my mind. I want to watch less and DO more, build more experiences and connect more with the people around me.

Hopefully you'll join me in unplugging once and while, to get out and enjoy the people and places around you!

Cheers to a full life!

Turning the page

Well I have to say at least I didn't wait another whole year to post. Close I waited ten months but hey its an  improvement right?!  I am not going to waste a lot of time with excuses and explanations because that's not productive. The bottom line short answer is I haven't really felt inspired to blog and something more interesting always seem to distract me from it. I am back hoping to post more and I am even working on starting a podcast. Which is proving to be way harder than I anticipated.

This past year has been an interesting one to say the least. I no longer work for the "man" and I am off the corporate ladder so to speak. Please don't feel bad for me, the closing of that chapter in my life has aloud me to start a new one. Its the first time in my life I have had the time and the opportunity to pursue my passions of which I found out I have many.  I have spent the last six months event planning, baking and catching up on all those things I said I would do if I just had more time.

The really good thing to come of all this transition and change is my inspiration to blog and connect has returned. I have so many ideas, and recipes I want to try and share with the one or two readers I have left. 

So I hope you'll check in once in while and get some fun ideas, watch me attempt new cooking techniques and just have a laugh. For all my homies still stuck in cubicles hopefully this will be a welcome distraction between spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations!