I'm going off topic a little bit here because I want to tell you what we've been up to lately. Don't worry, it's still food focused, just this time it's us cooking!
Just over a month ago was my 30th birthday. Mike surprised me by flying my two best friends into Calgary so we could spend the weekend together. Such an amazing guy hey? But after stuffing our faces eating out for three days we decided that we should buckle down and cook at home more often. I plunked my butt down on the couch (my favourite day-off daytime location) and scoured the internet for healthy-ish recipes to do up at home. I'm pretty sure that was the day that I used StumbleUpon to find recipes and at one point it told me "You have run out of pages to view. Please change your search or come back when the internet has more to show you". I was on the couch a lot that day.
I found six recipes that sounded pretty good- not too healthy, not too expensive, easy to do. Printed them all off, figured out my grocery shopping list and headed to the store. Bear in mind when I go grocery shopping I usually have a rough idea what to get. Never an actual list and budget. This was going to be tricky. All was good until I got to the cheese. I needed goat cheese and brie. I've never bought this stuff in my life. I must have stood in the aisle reading and rereading the recipe, googling things I didn't understand, for a solid 20 minutes. The lady at the counter probably thought I was a moron. But she found what I needed and I was on my way. Out the door with ingredients for six dinners and under budget!! YAY ME!!
First on the docket was Baked Garlic Chicken Parmesan. Seemed to me like an at home version of East Side Mario's Chicken Parm. I love that stuff. And in the end? Not fabulous, but we tried. Then we tried Simple Spring Linguine. Wow, that was bland. And if I say it's bland it must be pretty darn boring. We're going to keep both of these recipes and tweak them a bit, hopefully we'll get better results if we practice. Then there is the Herbs and Couscous Salad that still hasn't been made yet. (This is because it sounds a bit gross). I'm currently making the Roasted Salmon recipe, and I made homemade dinner rolls. Yup, yup, that's right. Homemade.
The final one we tried was the Spinach and Brie stuffed chicken courtesy of Martha Stewart. Again, this was the kind of recipe that sounds way better on paper than it actually is. I don't usually like help in the kitchen, but flattening the chicken breasts seemed to be a job to pass to Mike. I handed him the cast iron skillet and said "Beat the shit out of this". Woohoo! Thin chickens :) And I was left to spread the Dijon mustard, layer the spinach and add the brie. Then I had to roll them. That was tricky, as I don't have toothpicks on hand to stick them with. So some came out a wee bit uncurled. In the oven they go, all the sides are coming along and now it's time to eat!
What the hell? All of the cheese melted out of the chicken rolly things. It was all over the tinfoil. There was no cheese in the chicken. The outside part (forgive me I don't know what it's called. Rind, maybe?) was still inside, but any gooey cheese part was stuck to the pan. Shit. We ate it anyway, and ended up dredging the cut piece of chicken through the cheese stuck on the pan. Hey man, that shit's expensive, I wasn't going to let it go to waste.
*Sidebar* I just googled what the white coating is.
The velvety white rind is called flora. Flora is a mold but an edible mold.
Gross.
So we tried a bunch of new dinners, at home, saving money that week. I believe we even set a record for us! We had meals at home 18 times, that's six days of breakfast, lunch and dinner! And let me tell you - the pub on Saturday night felt soooo good!
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