Cooking!

This ends up being kind of a compound post, summing up most of the interesting cooking I have done from when we moved to Atlantic, up till tonight.

First off, I tried making hash browns:

This is actually my second attempt. The first attempt was *amazing* I was really happy with the appearance, texture, flavor everything. Heather felt that my first batch was nothing but butter, so the pictured hash browns have minimal oil. They aren’t as good that way, but still make for some nice variety, we pretty much eat nothing but oatmeal weekdays.

Next up, stuffed peppers:

Red peppers are fairly cheap right now, and I happened to see some remarks on a blog I follow about making some stuffed peppers. Heather and I have talked a lot about how introducing more vegetables into our diet would be a good thing, but haven’t necessarily done a great job of actually executing that plan. This was a step in that direction, these basically just have beans, rice and cheese in them. They took forever to make as I discovered mid-recipe that I couldn’t run the stove-top burners to simmer the onions and cook the rice at the same time as I preheat the oven. The end result was pretty good even then, just a little slow… Something that frustrates Heather I think, but she was happy with the end result 🙂

Finally, something more interesting, “Fettuccine with Sweet Pepper-Cayenne“:

Hey look! An action shot! 🙂 I sometimes get complaints about the dis-proportional number of pictures containing Heather vs. me. Hopefully this will be a step towards having a full time photographer for cooking related blog posts 😉

The full gallery of cooking pictures has a few of this recipe in-progress, and a finished product shot, if your interested check: here.

Not to get into a full play-by-play, but basically the cayenne made the sauce splicer than I had really planned, but fortunately Heather tolerates moderately spicy stuff pretty well. The texture and consistency ended up being a lot like stroganoff, but with a lot more kick. I am kind of proud of this one, not that it took any real skill, but it was something new that I didn’t exactly know what the end result would be like, and it came out pretty well.

I suppose if I am going to summarize all the cooking in September I should mention I made chili, but I don’t have any pictures of that. Really though, how exciting is chili? … I guess I have a kind of orphaned gallery I put up a long time ago of probably the last chili I made before my cooking had to take Heather into account. The gallery here has probably more onions than I have used in a single setting for almost two years. That chili is more interesting than the stuff I made last week 🙂 Not to say the new batch isn’t good, just not as interesting. … and now I am rambling

-Jordan