Tapas Dinner Tonight

In my last cooking hurrah before I head back to college, my sister and I will be cooking a Tapas dinner for my parents.

I'm going to make three dishes, but have no idea what they will be yet. I'm thinking a mini-version of my stuffed mushrooms (with a lot less spice), and maybe a small steak dish.

Time to think it over at work, then hit up Whole Foods after to get all my ingredients.

MasterChef 8/25

HOW DID TONY NOT GET STARFRUIT!!???

I think I could have easily dominated that Pressure Challenge. And I really wanted one of those burgers from the Red Team. They may have been completely unorganized, but that looked delicious.

Props to Sharone in the first episode tonight. Not only did his cupcake look delicious, but he cooked a great dish later on against Cat Cora. There was no way he was going to beat her - no amateur chef would - but at least he kept it competitive with a well cooked halibut.

Sunday Morning Breakfast

I love making eggs on the weekends. They are quick to prepare, and you can do so many different things with them.

This morning I made scrambled eggs with some olive and artichoke chicken sausage. With the eggs I mixed in some habanero hot sauce, some fresh olives and a little bit of feta cheese.

I cut the sausage up before I cooked it and then let it sit in the pan for a while while I got the rest of my ingredients ready. After the sausage cooked for a few minutes, I added the eggs into the pan with a bit of olive oil and then added in the feta when the eggs were almost done cooking.

It's not wonderfully put together on the plate, but it sure did taste good.

Recipe of the Day

Today's recipe is from Epicurious, and it is for a Carrot Cake. My all-time favorite dessert is carrot cake. I made this a few weeks ago and it came out amazing. The frosting is unreal, and it will be ten times better if you make it rather than buying the frosting from the store.

Carrot Cake on Epicurious

Thursday Night's Dinner

On Thursday night, my sister and her boyfriend came over for dinner, so I decided to cook for them. We had some wine, cheese, and bread along with these two courses.

The first course was a portabello mushroom cap stuffed with Habanero shrimp. This is a personal recipe, that is really simple to make.

Cook up some shrimp (not all the way) on the stove with some olive oil. While that is cooking, take a portabello cap and put a thin layer of cheese on the bottom (I used a grocery store bought Mexican blend). I took two fresh habaneros, some chopped baby bella mushrooms, and some already made habanero and Cayenne hot sauce (bought from Whole Foods), and put them into a food processor. I cut up the shrimp into smaller pieces, then tossed them with the sauce and put them into the caps, and then into the oven (350 degrees for about 10 minutes).

It was really good, but it was probably the hottest thing I ever ate in my life. I'm not a huge fan of spice, and this dish kicked my ass.

The main course was a maple glazed tuna with a pear-potato salad. I found this recipe on Epicurious. The recipe was really easy to follow, and it tasted absolutely delicious. The salad was really simple to make, and had a little bit of kick due to the curry powder. The tuna was also amazing, but I put too much olive oil in the glaze, and cooked it too soon before it was served, so it was slightly cold.

I would make both of these dishes again. The only thing I would change would be the amount of habanero in the sauce. It was a little too hot to enjoy, but if it were toned down a little it would have been perfect.

Oh, and for dessert we had some German Chocolate cake, which I made the day before from a Betty Crocker box. That was also pretty good.

Bon Appetit!

Introduction

Hi (Potential) Readers,

I believe all blogs should start with some kind of introduction. I started this blog to show my attempts at cooking. I do not attend culinary school (in fact I major in Corporate Finance and Accounting), and I have never taken a cooking class. Everything I know about cooking I learned from recipes and cookbooks (and some general things from my mother and sister).

My passion for cooking started a few years back when I started watching Hell's Kitchen. It wasn't until last year that I actually started picking up the knives myself. It began as me wanting to make one dish, which then blossomed into a hobby, and then grew from there.

I remember the first dish I really cooked on my own. It was salmon with a pineapple relish served on top of angel-hair pasta. It came out pretty good, the pasta was slightly undercooked, but it was a step in the right direction. After that night I began to cook more for as many people as I could.

I got my first cook book last Christmas as a gift from my sister. It was Gordon Ramsay's Fast Food. I cooked a lot of dishes from that book, and had an entire dinner party with recipes from only that. Earlier this summer I purchased another Ramsay cook book, and it has really helped improve my cooking ability.

Now, I'm not a good chef by any means. I couldn't walk into a fine-dining restaurant and be able to land a job, but as a college student without any formal training, I think I can hold my own.

This blog will show the different dishes I create, things I learn, and progress I make towards my goal of becoming a good chef (and maybe tryout for MasterChef). I will pass along recipes I use and find across the web.

I hope that people actually come across this blog, and if you do, please keep reading!