Puff Pastries with Caramelized Onions and Goat Cheese

Bought some puff pastry at the market and baked up some Puff Pastries with Caramelized Onions and Goat Cheese. Used two yellow onions and a container of organic goat cheese (herbed). Also made some with onions and ground beef from Prather Ranch.

Beef Stew

It's been a while, and I'm slowing down a bit in my cooking, but this weekend I made some beef stew. It probably took 5 hours when I'd expected 2 or so. Little did I know.

As my roommate cautioned, "Nancy, you should take any recipe and add 3 hours to the time they suggest." We had salad and the stew around 11:30 p.m. Sunday night.

Considering that I often use cooking as a timely distraction from anything else work-related, it makes sense that I try to make it last as long as possible.

Stew was pretty good. Needed more simmering to really tenderize the beef. I'm still on the lookout for a stew that has some tomatoes in it... like a very hearty minestrone with meat.

Omelet

Made some veggie omelets while Matt & Jonathan were staying at my apartment, and I'm saddened by the fact that I forgot to take pictures. Matt's was the sacrificial first, as it was smaller and kinda messy. Jonathan's was perfect - a good amount of the egg/soy milk mixture, lots of veggies, and it actually flipped over without much effort. The third and final omelet, which was to be mine, resembled scrambled eggs as it was refusing to flip over and attain its true omelet potential. I just covered the whole thing with salsa and said that it'd all taste the same anyway (though I'm a big believer in the visual perks of a well-made meal).

Yesterday morning, before I headed off to a big day in San Francisco, I pulled myself away from the usual bowl of cereal (which I had this morning around 11:30 am) and made this:

Must go out and buy bell peppers.

This was another attempt at making a meal without a recipe, as I'm aware that following everything precisely slows me down. But it is an easier way for me to remember what should be in my dish - I often will forget an important ingredient or two if I'm not looking at a list (for instance, I almost forgot to add the tuna to the tuna casserole I made last month).

Omelet (with very general ingredient amounts):

1 large egg, beaten with 1/4 cup of plain soy milk
2 pieces of sliced ham, chopped
1/4 cup of chopped onions
shredded mild chedder
cracked pepper to taste

Grill the onions and ham until whenever in a little bit of butter. Add the egg mixture to a buttered warm skillet. When the first side is done, flip it over with a spatula, wait a minute or two as it cooks, then add the ham and onions to one half of the egg disc. Sprinkle cheese over that. Continue to cook for another 30 seconds - 1 minute, then fold omelet over the filling.

Pretty simple, and it held me over until about 2 pm. Will have to do it again, but with some peppers and tomato for sure.

The veggie omelets made for Matt & Jonathan had asparagus, onions, orange and green bell peppers, canned sliced mushrooms, and maybe more. So many vegetables, but/and it was so good. Especially with the salsa (which had tomatoes, beans, and jalapeno peppers).

Mmm. I haven't cooked a big dinner in a while; maybe I'll do it tonight if I'm feeling up to it. But it'll happen soon, for sure.

Second Post

How sad - it's the second post, and already I need to apologize.

I've still been cooking but simply haven't had the time/energy to properly write about any of it.

Here's a picture of a recent quickly-thrown-together dinner:


I used refrigerated spinach & ricotta ravioli I'd been meaning to use for a while and sautéed the chicken apple sausage in the leftover oil from the pan-fried asparagus. The pasta sauce was just a thrown together concoction of olive oil, stewed tomatoes, tomato paste, garlic, chopped orange bell peppers, onions, and broccoli.

I haven't really been able to get my tomato sauces to taste that different from each other - I've made two tomato sauces before without recipes, and they've tasted almost identical. Maybe the ingredients have been too similar...?

Oh, I just realized that I never got to take a picture of the omelets I made for Matt & Jonathan when they came to visit, but hopefully I will have reason to make them again soon. They were quite tasty, and made good use of my leftover mushrooms and bell peppers. Went marvelously with the homemade Spicy Bean Salsa I had leftover from the housewarming party.

The cherry tomato post.

I hate coming up with blog titles and addresses and such, but I've finally settled upon something I can ignore easily enough. Perhaps. The nice thing about Blogger is that you can always change your blog's address. If anything, it just makes it hard for people to keep track of you. Very much like changing the time slot for a sleeper television show and hoping the fans follow.

Anyway.

I'm going to give this food blog a try. A few people have mentioned that I should start a food blog, and my first response is always, "I already have a food blog!" Then I remember that that blog is 1) about going out to eat and 2) shared with my dear friend and fellow foodie Mo.

This blog is supposedly going to be about my various cooking attempts. Recording the recipes and results and reactions of good cooking and bad experiments.

Let's keep our fingers crossed that no blood or vomit is shed!