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(We’ve transferred our first few entries from our Emeril’s project directly from our old blogs — thus the Bradfield and Artisan Logos.)

Sadly we have fallen behind on our Emeril’s project.  As I do my write up of this meal, Doug still has to do his from the meal prior to this one.  Hopefully we’ll be able to get back on track and do at least one a week soon.  The meal at hand though was Country Fried Steak with White Gravy, Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes, and Brown Sugar Baked Bananas.

Overall it was a success, but not without it’s flaws.  Thus far I’ve tried to choose recipes that weren’t too difficult for reasons mentioned in the other posts — I’m not the best in the kitchen.  And so far I’ve done alright, everything’s been completely edible!  It’s still taking me about twice the time to cook the recipe than what the cookbook says it should take.  I’m a stickler for following each direction though, so I probably read it about 100 times while cooking.  The steaks were pretty easy.  It called for some bacon for the gravy, so I did that step first.  Then dredged the meat in the season flour and cooked the cube steaks.  This meal turned out very tasty.  The gravy was not white as the recipe called for, so I’ll have to brush up and figure out how to get the gravy white, it was definitely more of a brown gravy by the time I was finished with it.  But brown, white — it tasted yummy!  Our main snafu with this dinner was the mashed potatoes.  I had already measured out the buttermilk, but we decided to do about half of the potatoes the recipe called for.  Before I could think it through, Doug had already poured in the milk — so it was a big pan full of mush.  Potatoes almost ruined!  We ended up cooking a few more potatoes so that we could mix it better.  We saved them and they were fine.  I’m still partial to my red, garlic mashed potatoes.

For dessert I chose the brown sugar-baked bananas, which were a different take on bananas foster.  There wasn’t any flambeing involved, and it was baked.  It also called for the juice of one orange which added a different twist to it, but it wasn’t overly powerful in the taste.  All in all, a good night, and good food.  I must admit, I’m still thinking about the tuna melt recipe that I started with — those were very good!  But I suppose it’s way to soon to start repeating recipes already.  :)  Until next time…..bon appetit!

(We’ve transferred our first few entries from our Emeril’s project directly from our old blogs — thus the Bradfield and Artisan Logos.)

 

(We’ve transferred our first few Emeril’s entries directly from the old blogs – that’s why you’ll see the old logos here.)

MENU 2 — My Turn

The pressure is on….me.  Cooking in the past has not exactly been my forté.  I literally set my kitchen on fire while in college — luckily my dad had made me purchase a fire extinguisher when I first moved into the place or the whole apt. probably would have ended up in flames.  That actually occurred right after Doug and I started dating, so he realized early on that he wasn’t falling in love with me for my cooking.  While I’ve come a long way since then, I still have a very long way to go to being an experienced chef in the kitchen.  Doug has actually spoiled me because he’s the cook of our house and he nourishes me with his good cooking often.  I’m more the dessert gal, sous chef, and breakfast chef.  So honestly, while this project is supposed to be fun and adventuresome, it really causes a small amount of anxiety for me — even though I realize as things go wrong, as they certainly will — it will be much more entertaining to read about.  ;)

The fun with these recipes actually started before I even stepped into the kitchen.  I was going to do the grocery shopping earlier in the day by myself, but realized I didn’t know what some of the ingredients were, much less where I would locate them in the store. (Capers was one of them that I’d heard of, but didn’t have a clue where to find them.)  I waited until later and had Doug go with me.  It literally took us about an hour to find all of the ingredients we needed for both recipes, and then we somehow managed to forget the spanish olive oil, so the tapas actually ended up getting cooked the following night.  By the time we got home I was pretty grumpy, and the last thing I wanted to do was cook.  However, Doug asked what kinda music I wanted, and he fired up Pandora for me with Madonna-like music.  It didn’t take me long to start coming out of my funk.  The first night we did the tuna recipe.    The book says it should take about  20 minutes, but I believe it took closer to 45 minutes for me.  For those with more experience with slicing and dicing, you could certainly do it quicker.  It was really an easy recipe in the end.  One that I would recommend for a nice twist on tuna, and should be pretty healthy as well.

Follow with me below for a bit more info on this first recipe.

Our furry feline family member is also reaping the benefits of our cooking excursion.  I usually drizzle tuna juice over his food, but his daddy went one step further and made him a small plate of tuna.  As I was editing the photos earlier, I realized that he inhaled it in almost exactly one minute.  A happy kitty was he for the rest of the evening.

The preparation was pretty easy.  It just involved some chopping and measuring out ingredients and mixing them together.  Though I do always give Doug a heart-attack every time I use the big knife because he thinks I’m going to cut off my fingers.  I’m actually doing better with the proper technique than I used to.

I look so little in our kitchen compared to the photos of him last week.  The photo of me on the right was when I realized he had been doing a video of me dancing and being silly.  ;p

Oh how my apron is so appropriate!!  I can’t burn wine!!

Yum!!  The tuna melts turned out wonderful!!  I’m so excited that at least I didn’t screw up the first one.  We decided to add some extra salt, pepper, lemon, and Emeril’s Essence to the recipe to ‘kick it up a notch!’  Next time we’ll also add some extra red onion.  Oh, we used french bread as well because the recipe calls for rustic white bread or other dense white bread.  We spent at least five minutes in the grocery debating what kind of bread that would be!!  (btw, no special guests tonight because I wasn’t sure how it would turn out since I was cooking, so we went simple with our blue paper plates for the evening.)  We also had a Riesling to accompany our meal.  Which also happens to be my favorite wine!  This particular bottle was really great.

I’m so incredibly proud of myself that my tuna melts actually resemble those of the picture in the cookbook — it’s actually really close!!

SHRIMP AND CHORIZO TAPAS

This recipe was definitely more involved than the first.  My sweet sous chef had chopped and measured out some of the ingredients while I finished up at work with an evening meeting.  I really feel like Doug helped me a lot on this one, but he claims he didn’t.  He did seem to stay a bit closer to the kitchen while I was preparing this dish though.  Plus it was my very first time cooking shrimp.  I know I lead a sheltered life — but keep in mind that I did grow up in Kentucky, and I didn’t even start eating seafood until 8 years ago when I met him, much less cook it.

It called for big chunks of chorizo that had to be sauteed.  I think it cooked just a little too quickly.  I don’t think there was supposed to be as much black, but it wasn’t burnt.

I danced a little jig when this one was complete because as you can see above, it looks pretty cool.  I’m not sure I’ve ever fixed something that looked so official.  Granted, I don’t think this recipe would match Emeril’s photo (there wasn’t one in the book, but we looked online), but it was still quite edible in the end.  If anything, just the recipe itself let us down a bit because it wasn’t what we were expecting.  When you think chorizo (good), shrimp (good), onions (good), bread (good) — you just expect more flavors.  We might have our culinary friends Tom and Melissa give this recipe a whirl to see where I maybe could have improved, and just see what their take would be on this one.

Well, I’m making myself hungry with all this food talk….but that’s okay because up next, hopefully in the next hour, is Trout á la Meuniére per Doug.  Til next time……ciao!  or chow!