Sunday, October 12, 2008

Home Cooked Meals

We've been extremely lazy since coming back from Colorado and I haven't really cooked a good meal. Oh sure, I made Breakfast Potatoes for dinner the night we came back, and then I made Spaghetti the next night. But after that, we just went the ordering out route. But the reason for doing this is because we didn't want to go to the grocery store--mostly because we would be going on vacation again and didn't want to have to force ourselves to eat a dozen eggs, or drink half a gallon of milk.

And I gotta say, it's taking it's toll on me.

Who ever thought I'd be like "But I WANT to cook!"?

I pulled out my new cook book (America's Test Kitchen: Restaurant Favorites at Home) and started reading it. Not the 'flipping through the pages reading the titles to find something that sounds good' type of reading. Actual READING.

And I found something intriguing about the America's Test Kitchen recipes (aside from the fact that they are very minimal on the pictures): They go into great detail about the hows and whys of doing what you're doing.

First recipe: Deviled Eggs.
Explanations of: How to best hard boil an egg, best canned tuna to get, why the recipe calls for oil packed tuna instead of water packed tuna, reason for saute-ing vegetables, and reasons why the garnish should be chopped instead of being left whole.
Recipe: Very similar to everything you know about Deviled Eggs (only there's tuna).
Picture: How to prepare to boil and peel an egg in drawings. There is no picture of the final product.
Verdict: It sounds delicious. And I don't even like fish but I'm now all like "okay, who's having a barbecue where I can bring deviled eggs?"

Then I went on to the second recipe: Shoestring Onions with Blue Cheese.
And then I had to wipe my mouth because I was drooling on the book.

But seriously, this is going to take a while to get through...especially when I read something (such has how to perfectly boil an egg) and then I'm like "Damn! I gotta try that! Where are my eggs?! Why didn't we get eggs at the grocery store?!?"

3 comments:

The Spiteful Chef said...

Were there at least pictures? I can't tolerate cookbooks without pictures.

And I don't think you should put tuna in deviled eggs. That's too much evil all in once place. Like Washington.

Anonymous said...

silly katina! You can just cook for all your co-workers before you go on a vacation and thereby use up any surplus food!! We are here to help you.

katina said...

Most of the recipes have little hand drawn pictures of one step of the recipe (for the eggplant rolls it's a picture of how to place the mozzarella and peppers on the eggplant). as far as pictures of the finished products, there is a grand total of 17. The book has 150 recipes.