The Thanksgiving Table...

Here is the table for Thanksgiving.  You cna also see our newly redecorated dining room.  I am so loving the orange!

Lunch ideas...

I have found that tootie is MUCH more likely to eat "cute" food. So, here are a few of the meals I have put together recently...

Mini bagels with strawberry cream cheese, raisins, red decorating gel and purple sanding sugar:


Whole wheat noodles "nests" with mini mozzarella balls:

oh la la!

I love Julia Childs. I loved her even before all the recent hype. I have her cookbook and read through it at least once a week. I treat it more like a novel than a cookbook. But, I think that isn't uncommon for people who love to cook.

Earlier this year I decided to tackle the epitome of french cooking...boeuf bourguignon.

According to Wikipedia:

Beef bourguignon (especially American English, pronounced /ˌbiːf ˌbʊərɡɨnˈjɔːn/) or bœuf bourguignon (especially British English, pronounced /ˌbɝːf ˈbʊərɡɨnjɔːn/[1] or French pronunciation: [bœf buʁɡinjɔ̃]), also called beef Burgundy and boeuf à la bourguignonne,[2] is a well known traditional French recipe. It is a stew prepared with beef braised in red wine, traditionally red Burgundy, and beef broth, generally flavoured with garlic, onions and a bouquet garni, with pearl onions and mushrooms added towards the end of cooking. Traditionally the meat was larded with lardons, but modern beef is sufficiently tender and well marbled that this very time-consuming technique is rarely used anymore. However, bacon cut into small cubes is still used to produce the initial cooking fat and added to the dish at the end.

The recipe take up 4 pages in the book and hours to prepare...I was immediately hooked.

We went all out for ingredients...

... European butter, prime cuts of meat, fresh vegetables and herbs and as much organic as possible.

I can't even tell you how delicious this was. The depth of flavor was amazing- well worth the time investment. I am including the recipe below and can't encourage you enough to try it.

Kitchen Alchemy.

As anyone in our family will tell you, I LOVE to cook. Seriously... capital L, O, V, E. I hunt recipes like I am on safari. It is no joke when I say that I have a huge kitchen cabinet completely devoted to cookbooks and the shelves are actually bowing in the middle because of the weight. I cut recipes out of magazines, copy them from food containers, search tirelessly on the Internet. I love finding new recipes. What I have realized lately is that although I love recipes, I really wanted to start making up my own. (But, I was scared because I don't really trust that I know what I am doing without the safety of a recipe.)

Over the past few weeks I have been trying to cook more on the fly. Looking at what we have in the pantry and making things around that. So far it has been going okay. Two highlights have been the grilled chicken with homemade pesto (the basil was from our GARDEN) served with spinach ricotta ravioli and last night I made up a recipe for black raspberry tart. We have a ton of raspberries growing wild behind the house so I put them on a sugar cookie crust with a light drizzle of glaze. It was pretty good.

Now I just need to learn how to photograph food because these pictures aren't so appetizing...