Tuesday, October 19, 2010

The office... part deux....

So, I tried Indian food for the first time today. Where I work the IT group had a luncheon and had a bunch of left overs so they invited my department for lunch... I was pretty surprised how good it was. The pic does not look too appealing but it did taste good.... The bottom of my plate is a spinach curry with paneer and to the right of that are lentils, both on rice.. on the top right, I can't remember what it was called but it had peas and potatoes inside of it and was fried. naan bread in the middle, potato and spinach pancakes and the ball was dessert. It was dough with a honey sauce... pretty yummy.... I wish I knew the names of everything... My co worker who was telling me what everything was didn't know and was also scared of the lentils... I'll just say what my mom thinks refried beans look like, he said that is what the lentils reminded him of ;) Ok moving on! I think I might of opened a new book... I shouldn't have a problem finding ingredients around here, since there are 2 Indian grocery stores about 2 miles from where I live. Just a matter of finding good recipes! :) If anyone has any, please feel free to share!

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Catching up....

So I'm playing catch up tonight... I keep forgetting to take pictures while I'm cooking... I've been wanting to test out my cake decorating skills from the class I took with my mom from the PA culinary school. So I had a box of German chocolate cake mix, baked the cake and whipped up 2 batches of Buttercream icing. One vanilla and the other peanut butter. The cake had 3 layers of peanut buttercream and the outside was frosted with vanilla... I wanted to decorate the top with roses, but I ran out of icing :( So peanut butter chips and chocolate chips took place of the roses. The cake ended up pretty good... I need to get my hands on some Sweetex, to use inplace of half of the butter for the icing... But I think I did pretty good for my first attempt at icing on my own....

Next up is dinner from Thursday night... Kidney Bean Risotto and Butternut Squash with a Maple Glaze.... I'm too lazy tonight to post the recipes... but if you would like them, comment and I'll send your way... The kidney bean risotto is super yummy! This was my first time cooking butternut squash.. the hardest part was peeling the damn thing! I was surprised how much it tasted like sweet potatoes...

Last night we had friends over for dinner and I made the Mexican lasagna, which is a couple posts below, and caramel apple empanadas for dessert. Wish I bought some vanilla ice cream to go with the empanadas, but I forgot :( We then headed off to Hundred Acers Manor Haunted House to freak ourselves out a little bit. ;)

Last but not least, dinner tonight, Rotini with a blue cheese mushroom cream sauce. My sauce turned out a little runny tonight... I cut down on how much cheese I used, since it was a little overpowering last time I made it... but I guess I should of cut down on the cream too... Third time will be a charm, eh?
Well, I'm going to crash early tonight... back to the grind tomorrow :(