Tuesday, July 26, 2011

We're Back!

For real this time, because I have challenged myself with something new.  You want to hear?  Of course, because I'm semi interesting and chances are if you finally got around to checking my blog, you are really bored. So I will assume you have nothing better to do.

So, when Todd and I arrived home from our vacation to Colorado (which was amazing.  Why do I live in such a crappy place?) I had a new motivation to start cooking again.  Larry at Living Hope Covenant mentioned that my now very old food photo album on Facebook was wonderful and he enjoyed seeing how well we learned to cook.  So naturally, I needed to find a new challenge since we have become complacent with our 10 favorite dinner recipes.

The new challenge:
To use one cook book a week to make dinner every night.  The dinners must be as follows.
2 chicken nights
1 beef night
1 soup night
1 pasta or salad night
Saturday is pizza and Sunday is leftovers.
Also a plus, if all the food is around $40/week.

We kicked the challenge off with Mad Hungry by Lucinda Scala Quinn.  This book is all about how Quinn taught her boys to cook and what she cooked them.  Monday's meal was her Pantry Bistro Salad.  Starting easy; it's hard to screw up salads.  

Ingredients
1 head of Romain lettuce
5 strips of bacon
1/2 white onion
2 poached eggs
Olive Oil and Red Wine Vinegar

Directions
1. Cut your bacon into small bits as to fry them faster.
2. Saute your diced onion and bits of bacon in a small lug of olive oil until caramelized and crispy.  Place on paper towel to drain.
3. Cut and wash your lettuce.  Place on paper towels to dry.
4. Bring a saucepan of water to a boil and attempt to poach 2 eggs.  I failed massively, so I ended up frying them over easy and over hard.
5. Salad...Assemble!  Lettuce, bacon and onions, egg, and drizzle with olive oil and red wine vinegar.

I made this because I thought Todd would like it, as I am not a huge egg fan.  But I must say, we both devoured this.  Partially because we were eating dinner at 8:30, and it was delicious.  The only changes we made were fried instead of poached eggs, and a yellow onion (because that's what I started cutting up and I wasn't going to waste half and onion!)

My failed poached egg.  I know when I'm bested.

The final product.  Add salt and pepper and some bread.

Tuesday's Dinner:  Fried Chicken

3 comments:

Oma Penny said...

A blog update! A nice surprise this morning. Oh, and Chicago isn't "crappy." It's just urban beautiful instead of Colorado mountain beautiful. Yeah . . . Nice looking salad!

Only Human said...

I vacationed in Colorado too! We should get together for coffee sometime soon. :)

Joy said...

hey, welcome back! i love salads and have put hard cooked eggs on them but never poached. i will give it a try. and don't give up on poached eggs. it may take a few times to perfect your technique but a good poached egg can't be beat.