Chef Blessings and Blunders

I love having a laptop stationed on my kitchen counter. Having access to thousands, nay, millions of recipes is very helpful when making dinner. My kids, 5 and 9, are extremely picky eaters. No longer do I make special meals for them as I once did; (and as my sister likes to remind me as my mother did for me! Gosh, I miss my mom.) The same for my husband who entered the marriage having only regularly eaten beef, peanut butter sandwiches and pizza. I admit as a kid I was terribly picky but now I enjoy trying new foods and usually find I enjoy them. Cajun seasoning, horseradish and garlic are flavors I savor. Veal is my new meat of choice. And I just bought Cornish Hens for our Christmas feast when my son just couldn't agree to duck. So I try to make a variety of foods. If they don't like it, fine, if they do, I usually faint. My husband always graciously thanks me for making dinner and says it was good. If his comment is "not bad" I know he didn't like it at all.

Tonight's dining adventure was veal scallopini. We'd had veal marsala a few weeks ago. Here's the link to the recipe I used. http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Veal-Scallopini/Detail.aspx It was easy and I only had to buy some mushrooms. May I recommend crimini (baby bella) mushrooms. Even Tim admitted they were good tasting and he NEVER eats mushrooms. This took about 15 minutes to make. I wanted to put it over linguine but I hated to pull out my BIG sauce pan. So we settled for egg noodles.

Prior to starting to dinner I thought I would make some hard-boiled eggs to put on salads for dinner tomorrow. I think I'm a fairly intelligent person, but it took me a LONG time to learn and remember how to make hard-boiled eggs. I think I've mastered the two-steps and let them sit for 17 minutes after boiling and immerse them in ice water. So I'm not too vigilant about monitoring the eggs as they're warming to boiling point. I was watching Word Girl with the kids when I heard what sounded like gunshots in our kitchen. I ran out and looked around stumped for a few seconds before I realized MY EGGS WERE EXPLODING! Yes, the one KEY step to successfully making hard-boiled eggs is turning off the heat when the water boils! I had a lack of vigilance yesterday when making tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner: I left the kitchen while the tomato soup was heating. When I returned it had burned the bottom of the pan. Tuesday we had tacos and I put the ground beef on the lowest heat and ran my daughter to her piano lesson, less than a mile away. I then decided to make another stop. When we returned the meat was a crusty dark-brown on the outside and pink on the inside. I'm sensing a pattern here.



I guess my attempt at food variety has made an impression on my daughter. Here is her instructions for making Thanksgiving Dinner: I don't use wine very often, not sure why she thought that would be necessary?

Food warning: If capers are on the list of ingredients be conservative. I thought I would add a few more and they overpowered (whatever it was) I made.

Do you ever inadvertently add too much cream to your coffee when refilling and then keep adding more coffee as you drink it? That's what I'm doing right now. I recently read where your brain makes its own cholestrol and diabetics with low-blood sugars starve their brains of this necessary nourishment causing a brain-malfunction. Maybe that's my residual problem. I love to blame blunders on factors I have no control over. But, I've got to face it: I'm over 40 and these things start to happen- as the doctor I saw today likes to remind me.

Hormonally yours,
Peg