Julia Child, Move Over

As I have probably made it perfectly clear, up to about three months ago, I was not the regular cook of the house.  My repertoire included a “large” salad, grilled cheese, BLTs, and that’s about it.  Baking was something else. But since DH does have much of sweet tooth, I tend not to do it.  Banana bread only when the five bananas I bought earlier in the week are not eaten.

However, the last few weeks DH has been working a lot, so we have been eating a lot of crap. I mean a lot. I do my best. The best solution I usually have is to buy prepared foods at WholeFood and bring them home. Usually yummy, but this has added up cost wise.

Then my friend at work introduced me to cooking blogs… and Google Reader… and the rest is as they say history.  My culinary experience has started off slow, but I do find it inspiring, reading the experiences of other moms, and it’s not about the kids, just about the food.  THEN… on Friday, Babble had the top 100 Food Mom Blogs, 2011, and my world was opened to 98 more blogs (I was a already an avid reader of one and I knew of another).  And Google Reader puts it all in one compact little webpage.

So with all this new found knowledge, I went scouring the blogasphere for the dinner recipe. DH had already complained about the crap we eat, so I was really making an effort to find recipes with meat. I’m not that big of a meat eater (pork, yes; sausage, yes; ground beef/ pork/ turkey, yes; fishes all kinds, yes; chicken NO, I hate handling raw chicken; beef steak, neah, just not into it).  I find a wonderful recipe found this lovely gem, Warm Asparagus, Gorgonzola Steak Salad. It just looked AMAZING.  I call DH, and he responds, I don’t know if I want a salad. ME: Did you hear it has steak in it? HIM: OH, OK.

At the Essex Market, I find a wonderful gem of a shop Formaggio Essex.  They didn’t have Gorgonzola, but they gave me a wonderful cheese in it’s place, and as a rookie mistake I threw out wrapper without writing down the cheese. Never fear, dear readers, I will go back and get the name. (Also, I wanted to say a sad goodbye to the Jeffery’s Meat also in Essex Market who did not open their “doors” on Monday morning.  This where the sirloin steak was purchased from on Friday, so it’s sad not to see them return to the market.)  The other issue I had, I couldn’t find yellow cherry tomatoes, so another rookie mistake, I just got yellow tomatoes and red tomatoes and cut them up.

The meal itself was delicious, but the tomato juices made a soupy mess. But a yummy soupy mess. The other problem because of the large chunks tomato, the meat didn’t get crispy enough. However, it did receive DH thumbs up approval, sticking with the cherry tomatoes.

Last night, I as I was trying to force some sustenance into our lovely daughter, I was making mac’n'cheese (from a BOX, nothing fancy) with peas, and I ended up grabbing the hot pot with a glove, and I have now two lovely burns, one on my thumb and the other on point finger.  Great! And after the scars I now have while making O’s dinner, did she eat any of it??? No. At least not until we threatened, NO ELMO, no running around in the basement, basically NO fun!  She grudgingly ate. Not a lot, but I guess enough to last her one more hour when she had two bottles of milk.  I guess she does need to eat something.