Kitchen Happenings

It is always one of my aspirations to cook more often. And while many folks are struck with the urge to clean their home from top to bottom at this time of year, I have been moved to make good use of the kitchen.

We have been cooking up a storm. A couple kitchen disasters like forgetting to add apples to a muffin recipe that resulted in more of a scone than a soft or moist muffin... And one night I was cooking up some soup that I was really excited about until I added the finishing touch - It was supposed to be a tsp of dry sherry, but I added a tsp of sherry vinegar instead. Yuck, I poured most of the delicious soup out and re-added broth and cream and then moped around the house for an hour before remembering that adding cheese to anything equal deliciousness.

John has tapped the maple tree and we now have fresh maple syrup for tea and cereal and everything else. It is the most delicious flavor I have ever tasted and will likely never be able to enjoy a drop of store bought syrup again.

I am usually one who likes to follow a recipe, I prefer a guarantee of some sort that my time and effort will result in a decent meal. I have been back and forth through our new favorite cook book Jamie Oliver Cooks at Home, but decided this week to stray.  I was inspired to make meatballs for the first time in my life. They were so good I made them twice again in the same week, once with a creamy mushroom sauce that we had called soup the day before - The Boy nearly chewed the end of the spoon off. This morning I made a root vegetable and sausage lentil soup that went particularly well with the leftover buttermilk biscuits from breakfast the other morning. But, the award this week goes to rice pudding made with rice, milk and vanilla sugar swirled with simmered strawberries. Oh my!

Cheers