I've been off lately. This weekend we had lots of company and my dinners just didn't fly....I'm going back to cookbooks for recipes I guess. This making dishes with a little of this, a pinch of that, a lot of this...sometimes just doesn't work. I'm also off on planning. We had some new friends over for dinner with their 13 year old son who, hopefully, will be the focus of a whole series of posts here called "cooking with Wes" Wes is homeschooled and I offered to teach him how to cook...his mom is super excited! Anyway, knowing Wes doesn't like vegetables too much made dinner a challenge. How could I get Wes to surrepticiously eat vegetables? Soup was my first thought, so I made a good batch of curried potato leek soup. I decided to wing the recipe rather than go look up my favorite, and it was good, but I forgot to put in that bit of garlic that brings everything together. I followed up soup with pizza...soup and pizza you ask? It didn't occur to me how wierd that was until the guests showed up. Anyway, I was able to hide some orange peppers in with the sausage pizza, so Wes probably got at least a 1/2 serving of vegetables (whatever he didn't hide in a pile on his plate) My crust was off though and it didn't rise as much as I wanted it to, so the crust was super thin. Add to that the fact that I didn't keep and eye on the crust and you have very crispy pizzas!
My apple crisp had too much ginger in it, though it did have a nice subtle taste without a bunch of sugar...a bit o ice cream would have been good on top, but I wasn't thinking again!
Sunday night I wanted to make Shepard's pie with a puff pastry crust. I didn't have any butter to make the rou with, so I made it with olive oil. We didn't have any cream, nor much milk, so I used chicken broth and lots of cheese. Well, the mixture separated when it was cooking in the oven, so I drained off most of the liquid and served the mixture: ground beef, potatoes, carrots, purple broccoli, leeks, and peas with the crust and it was actually pretty tasty since the cheese had soaked into the mixture and made it nice and tender and flavorful...just no creamy sauce....oh well...time to start eating out again.

Enjoy,
Seth