Food, Glorious Food!
So Kell has gotten into the wonderful habit of buying me cookbooks. So have my parents. All this is well and good, and leads to me making tasty tasty things.
Kell and I have a decent system worked out- she browses through the cookbooks, picks out what she thinks I should make, and I, usually without thinking much about it, agree.
This is troublesome when I agree without actually looking at the recipe.
Case in point: Kell had picked up a pasta cookbook and thought I should make a recipe called Spicy Pepper Pasta. She tells me that I need one each of a red, yellow, and green pepper. "Okay," says I, jotting that down on a bit of paper. What I failed to realize until after having gone to the grocery store was what was needed was a yellow, red, and green capsicum peppers. When did I realize this? After I actually read the recipe. Le sigh.
(Also required was a third of a cup of fresh chopped coriander- which I didn't realize until flipping through the front of the book, is cilantro. I thought I was supposed to drop a whole bunch of ground coriander into the mix. See that, learn something new every day. Of course, I didn't realize that until after having already made dinner... It was quite tasty though).
Some of the cookbooks are also down right, well British, referring to things that may very well be available in your local British grocery store or local butcher, etc, but that are simply not available in our sadly lacking American groceries. Examples: duck breast (as opposed to whole duck, though one of these days I'm just going to buy one and carve it up myself and make tasty duck dishes) pheasant, venison, certain cheeses.
One cookbook in particular had me nearly foaming at the mouth. Cookbook in question: Gourmet Burgers. What is so wrong with that, you might ask? Their definition of "burger" encompasses things that I would never consider "burger," and diverges into realms like kabobs, phyllo wrapped patties, and other stranger, seafood concepts and chicken sandwiches. Not. A. Burger. Of course, then they have what I can only call a top-shelf burger. Burger on top of steak with foie gras, truffle oil, and slices of truffle. It probably costs as much to make four burgers than what I spend on groceries for a week. I cannot deny however that there are some tasty tasty recipes in that book. I've only made one so far, what called itself a Bulgogi burger. It wasn't actual bulgogi by any stretch of the imagination, as it used ground pork instead of marinated meat, but hey, any dish that uses sweet chili sauce can't be all bad. Course, there was the mango-coconut cream sauce that I made to go with it (we're talking cilantro, mint, coconut milk, two types of ginger, and assorted other goodness- like more chili sauce) that then all got cooked in a foil wrap (alas for me that I had no banana leaves).
Good thing I like spending time in the kitchen, huh?