Team BeachBody April Photo Challenge- Day 11 - Ingredient (Make Up)

So unfortunately my two goobers have been feeling under the weather which means that my computer time has been severely reduced in the last few days.  I've fallen behind in my photo challenge but I intend on catching up this weekend.... hopefully... as long as everyone stays all better.

Source:
http:///www.recipe4living.com/articles/mighty_mushrooms.htm

Day 11's photo was "Ingredient".  My FAVORITE ingredient, which goes into practically everything I make, is the mushroom.  My love of mushrooms is definitely an adult thing.  As a child, I would laboriously remove any mushrooms out of food that I ate.  The local Chinese restaurant where we would get always served a ton of mushrooms  in the chicken chow mien my mom would order us. It would drive my mom bonky watching me pile all of the mushrooms up before I would eat the rest of my food.

Something clicked sometime during college.  Not only did I stop avoiding mushrooms at all costs, I actually started enjoying them.  Now, I can't get enough... So my FAVORITE ingredient- MUSHROOMS! 

Le Petit Menu

So being who we are, Steve and I have been enjoying cooking and preparing Max's introduction to the solid food world.  We've tried rice, carrots, sweet potatoes, zucchini, peas, regular potatoes, and apples n potatoes.  He's pretty much loved everything so far.  For tomorrow, Steve made him some oatmeal n apples.

DELICIOSO!

When folks ask us about why we make our own food.  I mean, yes, it's nice to know exactly what is going into the wiggly one's belly.  We're not super picky about the organic thing but it's nice to know where the food is coming from.  It's nice to keep our little glass jar count down.  It's fun to pick out a new veggie or fruit for the wee guy at the market on Saturdays.  But honestly, I am just genuinely staring to enjoy cooking.  I cook for Steve and me why not for Max, right?

Now, I'm just looking for some inspiration.  I've found a couple of cool websites with baby food recipes.  For right now I think we'll stick with whatever is in season at the market.  I'm always open to suggestions if you have them!  Bon Apetit!

New Year of Cooking

My attempt at the soup.  It actually looks like the picture!

Every year I try to improve my cooking.  I'm still learning and experimenting in the kitchen.  A big help to my cooking has been our weekly trips to the Farmer's Market.  A few weeks back we saw Nathan Lyon at the Torrance Farmer's market.  He had his cookbook with him.  I didn't buy it that day (I know I should have) but luckily he was back at the market during Steve's vacation and he picked up the book for me.  The cool thing is that the book is organized seasonally.  I started looking through the different winter recipes and decided to try the Sweet Potato-Carrot Soup with Candied Pecans (well, we switched out walnuts for pecans but everything else was as it should be).

My biggest frustration with cooking from cookbooks has always been that my food never really looks like the picture.  Image my surprise and delight at my soup ACTUALLY looking like the soup in the book.  Pretty cool.  The soup was tasty too!  The only set back was the fact that my co-workers said that it looked like I was eating baby food :-P. I was happy and am now looking forward to trying the tomato soup in the Winter section.  Yeah, Cooking!

Scoring at the Farmer's Market

Seriously scored awesome fruit at the
Farmer's Market

So as we do every Saturday, Steve and I packed up our rolling cooler and the Wiggly One into the car and headed down to Wilson Park for Torrance's Farmer's Market.  You'd think that the fall is dominated by vegetables, especially with Thanksgiving less than a week away.  Although there were tons of veggies at the market, including potatoes, celery, onions, and mushrooms (which were simmered for our Saturday night soup).  There was a crazy amount of fruit still available for sale.  We got apples, oranges, pomegranates, plums, kiwis, satsumas, persimmons, and tomatoes (yes, tomatoes are fruit :-P).

So, yes, it's fall but you'll still find amazing fruit at the local farmer's market.  Now to dig in! No better dessert for potato and vegetable soup than some fruit. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm Delicioso! 

Making Lots of Cornbread: The Importance of Serving Size

The World Famous Spot

So when my sister came to visit, she bought me a copy of the cookbook from my favorite veggie restaurant in the area, The Spot.  If you ever have the chance to head down to Hermosa for some great vegetarian food, I would definitely recommend it (the chili burger with "real" cheese, they have the vegan cheese but I prefer the real cheese on the burger).  So, anyhoo, my sissy got me a copy of their cookbook, Recipes from the Heart.  I decided to make their cornbread (another favorite from The Spot).

The Spot Cookbook

Those who know me know that I can cook well enough in order to feed myself.  I'll be the first to admit that Steve is much handier in the kitchen than I am.  Since I've been on leave, I've been trying my hand a bit more at the cooking thing.  It turns out the Steve keeps our pantry pretty well stocked so off I went for the final ingredients.

You know how most recipes tell you at the bottom how many servings (and even the nutritional information) you are making for your recipe so that you can scale up or down as needed?  Well, it turns out that the Cornbread recipe did not have this information.  It never really occurred to me to even think about it until I started mixing all of the ingredients.  Needless to say, I made a pretty substantial patch of cornbread.  Not to toot my own horn but it came out pretty tasty.  There's just a lot of it.  We finally got through the first pan of the bread.  We are making a good dent in the second one.  No matter how tasty anything may be, it's hard to eat it pretty much every day.  :) Oh well.  Just a word of advice, if you get the book and make the the cornbread, you WILL need the two pie pans.  It won't fit in one pan, unless it's really deep.  :)

Cook on!

New Recipe #1 - Mama's Red Beans and Rice (Chef Meg's Makeover)

One of my goals for 2010 was to try to cook 10 new recipes.  Last night, I tried recipe #1 from SparkPeople's recipe site SparkRecipes.

I tried Mama's Red Beans and Rice (Chef Meg's Makeover).  I did tweek some of the ingredients.  I used lean group turkey instead of turkey sausage and I cooked the rice separately and then added it in later.  Steve and I both enjoyed it and have decided it's a keeper... it's gone into my cookbook!  YEAH! 1 down, 9 to go :)  WHOO HOO