Soups Cooking, Must Be Cold Outside

As everyone in the good ole US of A is painfully aware of, it is COLD outside. And it has been cold outside for sometime.. For me and my immediate family here in Chicago, that's not that big of a story but for my family in Florida and Georgia we are talking Winter-agedon 2014!  If there is one thing that can get you all warm and cozy when the temp outside is well under 0 and the wind chill is well into negative double digits its soup! Luckily, my wife and I are frequent guests to the Foodgawker website and that's where we found this awesome blog with this awesome recipe.

There is nothing to hate about this (unless you hate flavor). It has veggies galore, bacon, chicken, dairy and what I think is completely underrated, gnocchi! What good and hearty soup doesn't have potato in it, right? Gnocchi is such a creative way to get that ingredient incorporated.

All in all, it was a very good meal. Matter of fact, my wife and I had to bowls filled that night and I had another for lunch the next day! It may not warm things up outside but it sure made things warm on the inside!

Learn from the Best: Ming Tsai

I was watching PBS one day with my wife and the show Simply Ming came on. My wife told me that he was a restaurateur and chef in the Boston area and that we should watch, so we did. It was Episode 1004-Cooking on the Fly: Thickening and unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available online. We caught the part of the show where he was cooking his final recipe which was Pan Seared Chicken with Orzo Risotto. I was amazed at how good it looked and how easy it seemed to be to make. I had to try it for myself, so I went online and found the recipe (wasn't easy to find). There were a few things about the recipe that were a little out of my comfort zone and so I did my own "on the fly" substituting! Instead of using the pumpkin puree I used cremini mushrooms and I didn't make the Endive Caper Salad. About 2 minutes into cooking the red onion I added the mushrooms so they could cook down a bit. At first, I was worried that the sauce wouldn't thicken without the pumpkin puree but after some simmering and a little more butter the sauce thickened nicely!

Here is the end result!

I also chose to use chicken tenders and made a nice little spring mix salad as a side. All in all it was a delicious success! This successful meal took me about 15-20 minutes to prepare and 15 minutes to cook. I know it is a bit of an obvious thing but I think that a lot of people miss this point and go right to cooking from a recipe. Watch an Expert and learn from them, they are called an expert for a reason. Making something from a recipe is great but you miss out on the small details that might make a good meal great and a great meal = memorable!

To Cook or Not to Cook?

So over the past few years I have only dabbled in cooking. When I say dabbling I mean I would under-cook chicken and cook steak until it was medium burnt.. There were some upsides to my dabbling, like with making chicken wings and producing a mighty fine Chicken Marsala. Those occasional wins were good and kept me trying but I really excelled during the holiday cooking when I got to make a turkey or ham and some sides. Those meals were a lot of fun to plan, prep, and execute. It felt like a perfectly timed orchestral movement once the "plan" was set into motion. The Turkey would be put in a brine and soak over night then it would be prepped early the next morning an popped into the oven for hours. While waiting I would prepare all of the fixings and inevitably the timers would count down to 0 and it would be time to eat. This meal was an accomplishment that produced immediate rewards (followed by over eating and sleepiness). Needless to say it made me want to cook more and more, to produce something delicious from a smattering of seemingly unrelated items. Is was hooked!

The search began for resources to put into use creating the next meal. I started where I think a lot of budding  home cooks start, All Recipes! This site is great and jam packed with so many recipes that there is no way you could try them all in your lifetime. I joined the site and tried many of its features, I especially liked the the shopping list creator and meal planner.

Here are two of the recipes My family and I liked the most:

Easy Tuscan Chicken

Chicken Pot Pie

Although I only posted two here I have tried upwards of 20 from this site with very degrees of success. But I would say most of them came out pretty nice and made for tasty meals!

Finding time tested and family approved recipes for meals can be daunting but having a resource like All Recipes to peruse before taking the plunge is a great tool to have in the shed. Just remember to be picky and look for the recipes that you think are going to be the most successful for your situation and above all when you cook something and it turns out to be awful don't give up just try something different next time. As of today 8/19/2013 at 8:54 CST there are  to choose from!

Introduction

I want to start off with a little information about me and why I am writing this blog. My Name is Drew, I am married and have a son. In no way have I ever had anything that can be considered to be formal training in the culinary arts and have really only recently, apart from a few go to dishes, adventured out and started trying to cook. I enjoy cooking (although not the cleaning up) and want to be better at it for not only myself but for those that eat what I have cooked, my family.  Although I have been blessed with the most amazing wife she suffers from the same issues as me when it comes to cooking and only knows how to cook those couple of “Go to dishes”  (different from mine but still limiting our culinary palette to like 5 dishes). So, since I am the one that likes to cook it all comes down to me!

Over the years I think that we become less tolerant of bad food (cooked badly, ordinary ingredients, not fresh) and less enthusiastic about the same old things.  There are just so many times that I can have Chicken or broccoli, backed potatoes or spaghetti. It was all just getting so blah and unmemorable. So here I am embarking on this adventure with all of you (or no one, I am not much or a writer for sure)! I hope that I can learn a lot, eat well, and pass along that and the in-between times to my followers.