The Last Supper

So, this is it.  The end of my Senior Project.

For my last meal, I decided to have barbecue in honor of Memorial Day.  My dad came over to show me how to work the charcoal grill, and I grilled burgers and corn. 

Growing up, my dad used to grill a lot when it got warm out.  He makes the best steak, and while I would like to learn how to make that next, it seemed like a good night for burgers.  They turned out really well!

Broiled Salmon, Rice, and Bok Choy

This is the second salmon dish I made and it was really good.  I marinated the salmon in lemon and garlic, and it had a really good flavor.  We broiled it in the oven so it was a little different then if we had grilled it like I did the last time.

Now the bok choy.  My mother came home the other day with it, and told me that she wanted me to cook it.  To be honest, I know nothing about bok choy and I'm not sure I've really had that much of it.  But, part of my senior project is cooking for her, so if she wants bok choy, then she gets bok choy.

After researching bok choy on the web, I figured out that it's pretty easy just to peel off the leaves and saute them in some olive oil and garlic, much like you would do with fresh spinach.  I got splattered with a little bit of oil, but asides from that the bok choy tasted really good.

Since I've been cooking mostly for my family and the crew team, I haven't really gotten to share any of my creations with my other friends.  So, I invited my friend Liz over for dinner and, thankfully, she seemed to really like it.

Tacos

Growing up, taco night in my house was always a favorite.  Tacos are delicious and I always enjoyed stuffing as many things into my taco shell as possible.

I found a recipe online for taco seasoning and tried my hand at making tacos.  I cooked the ground beef in a skillet with some broth and tomato sauce and threw in a bunch of seasoning.  They weren't as good as I remember my mom's being when I was little, but they were fun to make and a yummy meal.

Baking

So, after cooking some meals, I decided to take a break and try my hand at baking.  Over two days, I made a cake and chocolate chip cookies.  Now the cookies weren't hard, just slightly time consuming.  The cake, however, was in a league of it's own.

If you've ever made a cake from a cake mix, it isn't very hard.  You add some eggs and water, mix it, put it in a pan, and throw it in the oven.  It's deceptively easy.  Trying to make it from scratch, however, is a whole lot different.

It took me about an hour just to mix the cake batter.  The recipe was to make two 8" cakes, which is a lot of cake.  I made a classic white cake, with a whole lot of butter and a whole lot of sugar.  While it was cooking, I turned my attention to finding an icing recipe.

The morning of cake day, my mother had warned me that icing was very difficult.  I didn't believe her.  How hard could it be, right?

Very hard.  I decided on a buttercream icing recipe, and it was, in essence, just a whole lot of butter and confectioner's sugar.  It took about 30 minutes of whipping before it finally started to resemble icing.  It was delicious, and I was excited to assemble my cake.  I had no idea how difficult that would prove to be.

First of all, I didn't have the correct icing utensils, aka a big, long, flat spatula.  So I had to use a rubber spatula and a knife. It took me a ridiculously long time to ice the cake.  Apparently, you are supposed to just sort of glop the icing on the cake and not really spread it, but I didn't know that.  I tried spreading the icing and chunks of cake would come along with the icing.  It was a mess.


But my god, it was delicious.

The cookies were not nearly as difficult.  I simply used the classic Tollhouse recipe I found online and made a whole bunch of cookies to share with the crew team.

Whole Wheat Pasta with Salmon and Peas

Since there was some salmon left over from the previous meal, I decided to make one of my favorite meals that my mom makes for me: spaghetti with peas and salmon.  I love spaghetti and I love salmon and I love peas, so it's a winning combination.

This meal is really quite easy, and a great way to use left over salmon.  Just cook the pasta and the peas while sauteing garlic in a skillet with olive oil (I'm still trying to get rid of all that garlic I bought for the pasta sauce...).  Once the garlic is golden, add the salmon and the peas, before adding the pasta last.  Mix it up and it's ready to go.

 

Salmon with Wild Rice and Pineapple Salsa

So, I'm starting to step outside my comfort zone.  Now that I've mastered poultry, I thought it only natural to move on to fish.

I really like fish.  We eat it a lot in my house, and I love it.  Salmon is probably my favorite, mainly because it can be used in so many dishes and we eat the most of it.  It's weird, because while I will eat a tuna steak, I really hate canned tuna and tuna salad.  I don't know if it's the smell or the way it looks, I've just never been fond of it.

Quick story about tuna fish.  According to my mother, when she was in labor with me my father got hungry at some point and got a tuna salad hoagie.  Apparently, she got really mad and kicked my father out of the delivery room because having a hoagie around is, I guess, not what you want when you are giving birth.  So, maybe this is why I hate tuna fish.

Anyhow, back to the salmon.  To make the salmon, I just squeezed some fresh lemon juice on it with some salt and pepper and cooked it on the grill.  While it was cooking, my mentor helped me make pineapple salsa.  I learned how to cut a pineapple, which I had never done before, and got to eat some of the fresh pineapple, something I don't get to do very often.  While the salsa didn't turn out quite right, but it was OK.  We were missing a few of the ingredients so we made so substitutions, and that's probably why it didn't turn out the way we expected.

The rice we made was a wild rice mix.  To make it more flavorful, we cooked it with chicken broth, and it tasted really good.

 

Turkey Chili and Cornbread

Wow.  This is the first time I've made something and been blown away by how good something I cooked has tasted. 

My mentor, Catherine Montagne, gave me this recipe to try.  Her sons all told me it was delicious and hearty, so, with her help, I whipped up a batch.  In essence, you just brown some turkey in a skillet, chop up a bunch of vegetable, throw in some beans and tomato sauce, put it in the slow cooker and let it simmer.  It was pretty quick to prepare, and I put it on to cook before I left for crew practice, and when I got back a few hours later, I had a hot and hearty meal waiting for me.

To accompany my chili, I made some cornbread (I have to admit that I cheated, and it was from a box).  I'm sure if I had made it from scratch it would have been better, but it was still pretty tasty and the perfect thing to go with my chili.

Lime and Garlic Chicken

Ah, more chicken.  Chicken seems to be a staple food in my household, and in many others too.  It's plentiful, easy to get, relatively cheap (as far as meat goes), pretty healthy, and very versatile.  It also, in my experience, can be prepared easily and made to taste delicious.

Lime and Garlic chicken is exactly what it sounds like- chicken marinated in lime juice and garlic, baked in the oven, and served.  Very simple, but it is delicious, and probably my favorite meal to date.

With the chicken, I also made saffron rice and steamed broccoli.  The rice is easy- just stick it into some boiling water and wait a while.  As for the broccoli, we always eat our vegetables steamed in my house because the vegetables retain their nutrients better than boiling them.  However, I never really knew how to steam the vegetables before.  It was surprising easy.  Just stick them in a colander over boiling water and let it sit until they are tender.     

Voila.  Home-cooked meal with minimal effort.

Potato Frittata

To preface this post: I hate eggs.  I really do.  I'm not sure why, I just think they are disgusting.  The smell, the texture, the taste- I find it all incredibly unappealing.

Every weekend during crew season, we have a spirit dinner.  Basically, it's just an excuse for us all to get together, stuff our faces, and get excited for our races.  As part of the tradition, a family hosts it each week and is responsible for making a ton of pasta.  Everyone else who comes is supposed to bring a side dish of sorts, drinks, or a desert, depending on the week.

While most people just bring something simple the bought at the store, my mother insists on making a dish every week that she considers good food for us to eat prior to our races.  Thus, the frittata.  It's potato and eggs, so it packs a lot of protein and carbs, just what you need the night before the race.  While I refused to touch it, everybody seemed to really like it.  So thank you, mom, for encouraging us to eat good food that actually (I'm told) tastes good.

 

Second Meal

Baked chicken served as my first foray into cooking protein.  It's simple, really: just throw some spices on it, bake it in the oven, and it's ready to go.  However, I must say, prior to this I turned a blind eye to the preparation of the actual chicken. 

To get the chicken ready for baking, apparently you have to cut off all the fat and other parts that you (I assume) wouldn't want to eat.  Now, I must admit, I am not a squeamish person by any means.  I can handle blood, guts, feces, dirt, mud, slime, puss, and just about anything else without batting an eye.  But, as it turns out, things that don't typically make you squirm have a much different effect on you when you realize that you might have to eat them.  Perhaps I will call this the "Fear Factor Effect".

As I was cutting the fat and other less-than-appetizing parts of the chicken, it dawned on me that what I would be cooking, quite literally, was chicken flesh.  While I am a very carnivorous person, and eating meat has never phased me, faced with this realization I lost my appetite.  While the chicken looked delicious coming out of the oven, I could only eat about half of one piece.

Thankfully, about a week and a half removed from this incident, I still eat meat like it's no one's business.   Don't judge, vegetarians.

First Meal

So... now that I finally figured out how to upload the pictures (I know, totally lame- I'm a teenager and I don't know squat about working uploading pictures), I can start blogging!

For my first meal, I decided to start simple: spaghetti and sauce.  Spaghetti is a staple in my house, and I alone can go through about 2-3 boxes a week.  The sauce wasn't hard to make, it just took some patience.  In essence, it's just olive oil, crushed tomatoes, garlic, and onions left to simmer, but there lies the problem: I didn't want to wait. I wish I could say that it was worth the wait, and having made it myself meant it tasted that much better, but it didn't.  It was good, but I was so hungry by the time it was done I would have been just as satisfied had it come from a jar.

The greatest learning experience of the day was food shopping.  I had to go out and buy the garlic and the crushed tomatoes (the rest of the ingredients I already had), and I mistakenly bought one pound of garlic.  Yes, I have one pound of garlic sitting in my fridge right now.  As I assume most people know, that is a TON of garlic.  Seeing as the recipe itself only called for four cloves of garlic, one pound was certainly not needed.  Oh well, lesson learned.

 

My Senior Project

This blog will be used as a place for me to post about my cooking over the course of the next few weeks.  The focus of my senior project is to learn the basics of cooking, and I intend to cook one meal every day for the next couple of weeks.  Stay tuned to see the results!