Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Adventurous Eating

Growing up, I was never an adventurous eater.  Well, compared to my sister, maybe I was :-).  Now I've found that I love many types of food that I wouldn't have thought about trying only a few years ago.  I love Thai food.  I love Indian food.  I love curry.  I love calamari.  I even like mussels.

At this point, I would try almost anything.  ALMOST.  Forget trying bugs.  I will not try bugs.  A couple of weeks ago, Alex and I were at the Farmer's Market, and one of the vendors was selling farm-raised, dressed rabbit.  Yes, that's right.  I said rabbit.  Did we buy one?  Yes, of course we did.  The woman at the farmer's market stand told us that rabbit can be prepared any way that you would prepare chicken.  So, we decided to make oven roasted rabbit.  Here's a picture of the finished, plated product.



Verdict: No more rabbit.

It was not terrible, but it also was not good.  We'll see what they have at the farmer's market next time to add to our cooking repertoire.

A better experience was our sangria experiment.  After having a glass of blackberry sangria at Outback Steakhouse that tasted like pure blackberry flavoring, we decided to make our own sangria.  Strawberries, blackberries, pineapple, ugli fruit, apples, and red wine.  Yum.  It was definitely an improvement over the restaurant sangria.



In other news, my laptop screen shattered awhile back much to my dismay.  I had been plugging it into my 40 inch TV to use it, which means I had to sit about 3 feet from the TV on the floor staring up at the screen.  Not so much fun.  But... my amazing boyfriend installed a new screen, and now it works perfectly again!  Yay!



Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Yummy!

It's been so long since I've posted on here...so I'm forgetting the update and moving on!

Lately, I've been trying really hard to make a menu, make few trips to the grocery store, eat out less, and cook more.  This post provides a couple of awesome recipe recommendations!

Things I've tried recently:
  • Chicken Tikka Masala 
  • Slow cooker Mexican
  • Breakfast pizza
  • Spinach & ricotta-stuffed shells with shrimp
  • Pita pizzas
Most of these have been from a friend's food blog (which I would HIGHLY recommend, in general).  Overall, we've like all of the dishes above with the chicken tikka masala easily taking 1st place!  Her blog is at sarahwalbridge.wordpress.com.  Seriously...check it out!

I also just got a bread machine from someone on Craigslist for free!  What a great deal.  It works perfect and is so easy...even easier than running to the store for bread!  I've been using a recipe from allrecipes.com, which was rated 5 stars by hundreds of people.  They were right.  It's great.  (You can find the recipe here.)

My biggest struggle is actually using all of the produce I buy for each recipe before it goes bad.  It seems like I always have too much celery or green onions.  I've found that cheesy potato soup loaded up with lots of extra veggies works great.  We also threw a bunch of stuff in the crockpot (with chicken and ground pork making of a majority of it) last weekend, spiced it up Indian style, added veggies at the end, served it over rice, and it was delicious.  It was one of those things that I'm not sure could be recreated if we tried.

I'd also like to find a good curry recipe, so if anyone out there could send one my way, I'd appreciate it.

Well, it's time to get back to writing my thesis!