Let's get cookin'

We are nearly a whole month into 2015 and I don't even know where the time has gone! I don't know because, to tell you the truth, I haven't done much. That is mildly intentional ; I was ready for a nice relaxing, boring introduction to the new year. Last year was so exciting that I'm still a little tired from it, but I'm waking up. Slowly, but surely. 

I've been starting and re-starting this blog post for two weeks now, because I felt like I should be providing a really epic start to a new year on Sheridan's To-do List. And I started working on a truly epic to-do list for 2015. It was coming along beautifully. It has headings with sub-headings and bullet point lists. It's specific and measurable and timely and all the other SMART things your goals should be. It's categorized and alphabetized and prioritized and... and...

And it is sitting unfinished between my laptop, my tablet, my work computer and my scattered notebooks. Oh well, it's a beautiful work in progress.

So here I was, waiting and waiting on myself to finish a lofty to-do list just so I could come on here and talk to you about this grand to-do list that has taken me away from actually getting things done because the first goal was to make the goddamn to-do list! A vicious cycle if ever there was one. 

Spinning my wheels on this year's to-do list is just a symptom of the larger issue, of course, which is that this year the sky is kind of the limit in terms of what I want to accomplish. The past few years (my whole life?) has been very straight forward on certain to-dos. Finish thesis. Graduate. Get married. Get a job. Check, check, check and check! So now, what I want to do is a much vaguer and more exciting question. Not that those previous things weren't exciting. They were amazingly exciting in ways I wouldn't have even guessed at the outset, but they were easy to focus on because it was easy to decide that I wanted to finish grad school. I wanted to marry Tom. I wanted a better job. 

Now what do I want?

Instead of taking even longer to detail every single thing I want to do this year, this decade, this lifetime, maybe I should just take some advice I got while working on my thesis and just start writing. 

So here we go. First thing on To-Do List 2015:

Be a better cook

Now, I love to cook. I like to eat and I'm an almost reformed picky eater, so cooking became a natural hobby since I get to control exactly what goes into the food I eat. And I'm a pretty good cook, if I do say so myself. Not amazing, no Top Chef here, but I can cook from scratch and it doesn't always come out terrible. 

But I'd like to be better. One of my long-term I'll-probably-never-reach-it-but-I-might-as-well-try goals is to cook all of our food from scratch. I know, I know, that is a REALLY lofty goal, but sometimes the journey is the destination, man. So to work towards that nearly impossible goal, I'd like to get some more skills under my belt. 

Because I can cook. But I don't cook efficiently. I've got NO knife skills. And considering I've been spending more and more time cutting up produce and such, it becomes quite time consuming. Do you know how long it takes to dice something, anything, when you are lousy with a knife? Painfully long.

This past month we have tried a few new recipes, because isn't the best way to develop new skills to just go for it? 

One recipe we tried was a roasted butternut squash soup I got out of Self* magazine. It sounded great! Roasted butternut squash, golden beets, garlic, onion, all blended together on a cold winter day. What could be better? 

Our first attempt

Well, what could have been better was that I could have NOT burnt basically all of the vegetables. I followed the recipe, I think, to a t! What happened? Who knows, but that dark brown color above is certainly NOT what was supposed to be in our bowls that night. We doctored it up with goat cheese and sausage and red pepper, but to little avail. We sopped up the burnt mess with some good bread, but as soon as that bread was gone, so was any pretense that we were going to choke down more soup. 

Fail. 

Luckily, we had to buy such a quantity of root vegetables for this recipe that we decided we would split it into two batches. So we had a whole giant Tupperware full of all the fixings we needed for a take two as well as a little know-how to avoid the burnt disaster that was take one. 

Success! Notice the drastic difference in color?

And so it was that we managed to produce an edible soup a few days later. I won't go into detail about how I avoided the initial pitfalls of the recipe, but I will tell you that I took the LONG way. This was supposed to be a quick, easy soup and maybe one day it will be, but it was not on that fateful winter day. It was delicious, though, and it will be made again. 

Fortunately, I am not one to get dismayed at culinary catastrophes as I always enjoy a good "emergency pizza" when they happen. And usually the food we produce is edible if nothing else. Usually. 

Our next adventure last month was pho. You ever try pho? Do it today. It's rainy. It's a good day for pho. Really, EVERY day is a good day for pho. It is a Vietnamese beef noodle soup made with fresh and dried herbs, thin and delicate rice noodles, served with a side of heaven. I'm not exaggerating; it's one of the best foods maybe in the whole world. GO GET SOME NOW. 

Eating it at a restaurant is a pleasant, warm, homey experience. A steaming bowl of broth and noodles, some finely shredded beef, a plate of sweet and savory and tangy additions to make the soup your own. Ahh...

We did NOT make this pho

Making it at home sounded easy. It's all in the broth, really. Get some good beef bones, the right blend of spices, a big pot and a whole day to smell the amazingness of gently simmering deliciousness. We had all of that and yet... 

Tom looking so hopeful at Assi

Our cart looked like a place you'd want to live

And yet something didn't come out quite right. We got the right bones (we think). We got a perfectly portioned spice packet (hopefully?). We let it simmer for the right amount of time. We followed the recipe. Didn't we? Didn't we??

The spices that, if nothing else, kept our home
smelling crazy good all day long

The broth was too fatty. That was for sure. There must have been an inch of oil floating at the top. We skimmed it off, several times actually, and it still seems to be a little more oily than we've ever had at any restaurant. The color was too dark, not the nearly clear brown broth we wanted. The taste was just... Not. Quite. Right. 

Our pho. Not bad at all, but not money.

I don't know how good a palette I have, which I'm going to guess means not that good. When we did wine tasting at my previous job, I never picked up on the notes of blackberry or toasted tobacco or whatever I was supposed to taste. It tasted like wine. Dry or sweet, I could tell you, heavy or light, but nothing about defining the flavor. Luckily, I don't care much about wine. I do care about food so it is frustrating that not only can I not get the recipe right, but I don't even know what exactly went wrong. 

I'm being hard on us, of course. Pho is one of those recipes that sounds very simple, but if you don't know what you are doing, especially when it comes to picking out ingredients, you're not going to get the results you want. And it was only our first time. It was a lot of work and not the cheapest recipe to make (in part because it produces A LOT of broth) so I don't know how soon we will get to it again. Rest assured you will hear all about it when we do. 

We've had this bag of condiments for years
and I finally got to use it when I realized we
had no soy sauce for dumplings. Boom. 

While I keep on adding recipes to our repertoire, I hope to keep adding on to my skill set. As I mentioned, knife skills top the list on things-I-suck-at-that-I-wish-I-didn't. It doesn't end there, though. It's going to be a long winter and there's no better place to be than your kitchen during the doldrums of February and March. 

2015 Cooking To-do:

- learn to use a knife, faster, but safely 
- get a few sauce recipes under my belt (dipping sauce, pasta sauce, hollandaise sauce, all sauce all the time)
- utilize our pizza stones (yes, plural) for more homemade pizza. A LOT more homemade pizza
- finally use the yogurt maker I was so excited to get (and has been sitting in the closet since our wedding)
- make vegetable stock with all the leftover produce trimmings I've been saving
- learn more one-pot or crock pot meals so we don't have as many dishes to do all the time
- keep a well stocked pantry 
- cook a cake from scratch
- make homemade bread
- perfect our dumpling recipe
- more soup! 
- figure out what went wrong with the pho. Fix it. 

That is just a small smattering of the culinary accomplishments I'm striving towards this year. I'm constantly coming across new recipes and snack ideas that I want to try. Pinterest is my favorite time-suck and I've actually gotten some great recipes there. Check out my page if you want to lose an entire afternoon of your life and not even mind: https://www.pinterest.com/sherideez/ 

If you ever want any of the recipes I talk about, just leave a comment and I will post them. I'm too lazy to put them all up here and to be honest I don't follow them exactly all the time, so I can't promise our results will come out the same. But I'm good for lots of extra tips! Here is an extra tip, on the house. When you are looking at recipes online and really want to make them well, READ THE COMMENTS. You will learn everything you need there. Sometimes the people posting recipes haven't even made them, so the comments section is where you get your real info on what works, what doesn't, if there is too much sauce, not enough, freezes well, isn't worth your time, etc. Live in the comments section. At least on recipe sites. 

Well, here we are, the end of the first post of 2015. I'm getting all misty eyed... oh, wait, no, I'm just getting hungry. What are your cooking aspirations? Learn a souffle? How to filet a whole fish? A grilled cheese? Tell us! We have a lot to learn from each other and maybe another reader has a helpful hint on how to make that coq au vin you've been struggling with really shine. Or not. You won't know if you don't ask. 

One more hint before I go stuff my face with my scrumptious if not that ambitious peanut butter and jelly sandwich.... If you are new to cooking, or just looking to expand your standard skills, I cannot recommend this book enough:

Everything you need to know is in there and every recipe comes with helpful hints on prep, flavor profiles, time savers, etc. I've read this book so many times it is falling apart, although you can still borrow it if you want. Really, everyone should have a copy. I've only made a few recipes in the book, but the advice I've gotten in there was worth every penny... that I didn't spend because my mom gave it to me for free. Whatever. Get the book. 

And have a fulfilling and exciting day!

*Another goal of mine is to get more use out of my fitness magazines. Actually using the exercises they recommend or the recipes is the main part of that goal.