Cooking with bare minimum pantry items and kitchen equipment left by generations past. Produced a decent tuna pasta made of shell pasta, canned tuna, canned corn, salt & pepper, and MUSTARD. yum-o. and with some crushed tortilla chips and vietnamese hot sauce, this is heaven. perfect even when eaten cold from the fridge. make sure to put chips and hot sauce just before eating.
this chips in pasta deal is something i learned from my husband and brother-in-law over the holidays. we were at a beach house and we would wait for the signal that the kids were done with their dinner and ATTACK their pasta bowls. with crushed barbeque doritos and that hot sauce, we were munching like there was a famine tomorrow.
Day 2 (part 1):
Pantry finally stocked. Eggs, dried herbs, condiments and basic baking ingredients purchased. I realized that stocking a pantry is not a cheap task. BUT still worth it - feels awesome to read recipes and know you have most, if not all, of the items and you can make it without 10 trips to the grocery store (so far, there has been no store here where you can get EVERYTHING. like amazon on land. or something. ANYWAY...).
The result: herbed eggs by Ina Garten meets Ree Dummond's baked eggs (c/o of kindle edition cookbook) = baked herbed eggs on a bed of ham topped with cheddar cheese. without a clean oven, i made this in a toaster.
thus, no picture because i was afraid it would be a a complete failure.
who knew it could come out so awesome? i need to pay my respects to the women who gave us these recipes so i am going to make this for my husband on saturday morning in the oven. i promise. and with real garlic. (yes, i am an airhead. i proudly stocked the pantry but forgot things like garlic and butter. brain fart. blame it on gas.).
Day 2 (part 2):
After walking away broken-hearted from the world's most perfect standing mixer, i went home with almost all the kitchen equipment and tools i had read to be needed when starting out (refer to the cookbook my sister had given to us in my previous post). also, a clean oven, thanks to the cleaning lady. within an hour, i was baking. and being the invincible creature that i am, i didn't prep anything and just followed the recipe and measuring, mixing, and beating as i read through it. smart huh? coupled with the world's most defective oven (i saw smoke after 5 minutes of pre-heating), i churned out a pretty decent red velvet sheet cake (thanks to my sister-in-law who dropped by and saved me from the chaos. she smartly adjusted the oven temperature) and pointed out the blood-like splatters all over the kitchen thanks to the red food coloring i had mixed in.
BUT I managed to make the the best frosting ever care of a recipe by Ree Dummond (aka The Pioneer Woman and my hero). try it. you won't regret the aching arms after needing to cream butter and sugar for that long of a time.
Day 3:
After eating the pasta salad for 2 days in a row, I was ready for new food. I decided to make a mushroom cream pasta from The Pioneer Woman (of course). And boy was it good and easy to make. Almost got drunk. Yes, I'm a cheap drunk.
I had a mini panic attack though when I realized Ire had no wine cork to reseal the bottle and thought I would have to drink it all to avoid wasting the wine. I woke up from the insanity and just stuck it in the fridge in hopes of being able to buy the cork in the store (and boy did I search hard that afternoon. I got it. Yamuni saves the day).
Oh, and because of some leftover frosting from the day before, I decided to make these chocolate cupcakes. Turned out looking perfect and tasting decent but the ground coffee didn't incorporate well and are still pretty much intact.
There was leftover batter though, so I just dumped it in a sheet pan (I'm lazy) and made this pecan frosting from my hero. again. I promise to explore recipes from other sources. promise! this was SOOO good that i had some more when i woke up in the middle of the night. this is the problem when your husband is away on business trip and there is no one to make you stay in bed when you have midnight cravings. it's his fault. always. i digress. best to have this hot and with ice cream top. the gooey frosting will make make you moan.
so that, in the longest blog entry this side of the farm, sums up my first three days in our kitchen. the biggest lesson learned is to bake in my mother-in-law's oven...30 meters away from ours. the exercise will justify eating half of whatever i bake from now on.
xoxo,
Janice
