Week 6

Well I had some trouble posting last week because Blogger was doing something weird but it’s all working now and I’ll get last week’s blog up soon. This week was a pretty busy week and I got a lot done but unfortunately I wasn't able to do all that I thought I was going to be able to do this weekend. I had planned on setting up a garden but instead I ended up just doing some research on it. While looking online I found a list of a few fast growing vegetables that grow within 6 weeks so I'm going to try and start those up sometime this upcoming week. My mentor also mentioned that a lot of baby vegetables grow very quickly so I'm going to look into those as well.

• Cress
• Lettuce
• Mustard greens
• Oriental greens
• Radish
• Scallions
• Spinach
• Turnip

For cooking not much new happened this week but I'm getting much more comfortable cooking myself meals now and I'm much faster now compared to a few weeks ago.
-Monday I made Raviolis which were very good. They were the premade kind of so all I really had to do was boil them but it still was good. I also made the sauce which wasn't too hard either which was made of 1/2 cup onions; 1/4 cup red wine, 1/4 cup chicken broth, 1 pint grape tomatoes, and 1 clove garlic. It took a little while to cook but tasted really good when it came out but my sister didn't like it too much but everyone else did.
-Tuesday I made a crock pot chicken which tasted delicious. It was probably one of my best tasting meals so far. This is one of the first that recipes that I have gotten online and I really liked it. Ill upload a picture of it though the one I made held the beans because my sister isn't a very big fan. These are the ingredients...

· 4 -5 boneless chicken breasts
· 1 (15 1/2 ounce) can black beans
· 1 (15 ounce) can corn
· 1 (15 ounce) jar salsa, any kind
· 1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese

It’s pretty basic stuff but it still tastes really good. This also was the first time that I did a crock pot meal which was a lot easier in my opinion because all you do is plop the chicken down in there and come back in 4 or 5 hours and its ready to go. My mom makes caritas like this all the time and it tastes great so I’ll probably try making some of that up soon. For desert I made crepes. I used to make them with my grandma so I still remember the recipe because we made them so many times. They are pretty simple to make but the only problem is they either taste good or they don't. Some batches for some reason can come out much different than others for better or for worse. I also made some homemade syrup to go along with it but came out tasting far too sugary for me but my sister ended up eating almost all of it.
Thursday- Well tonight I was feeling like Mexican food so I decided to make some enchiladas. I used a recipe online for beef enchiladas which turned out to be, in my opinion, very good. The ingredients were pretty basic stuff and consisted of cheese, olives, and tortillas (of course), cumin, vegetable oil, and some ground beef. There was a recipe to make the sauce that went along with the enchiladas but I didn't use it and went ahead with using some premade stuff. The recipes said to soft fry the tortillas which I had to look up to know how to but that wasn't too hard to do. After that I pretty much added the sauce and vegetables then rolled the mixture into the tortillas. They cooked fairly quickly and overall it only took about 25 minutes for them to finish. I’m now beginning to realize how nice it is to think of something that would sound good to eat and be able to fulfill that request all on your own.

Saturday- I have always like bread and rice pudding and I decided to learn how to make them myself. My grandmother was going to teach me how to make the bread pudding but she wasn’t available so I went with the rice this time. The recipe was pretty basic and there weren’t too many ingredients and I didn’t even have t go to the store t buy and which was nice. I needed:
1Quart(s) Milk
1 Pint(s) Heavy cream
1/2 Teaspoon(s) Salt
1 Vanilla bean
3/4 Cup(s) Long-grained rice
1 Cup(s) Granulated sugar
1 Egg yolk
1 1/2 Cup(s) Whipped cream

The first step was to make an odd concoction out of a combination of the milk, cream, salt, vanilla bean and a 3/4 cup of the sugar. I brought this to a boil and then added the rice. At this point it sort of looked more like a clumpy mess than a pudding (though I guess that just what a pudding look like). Next I added more sugar and egg yolk, after it cooled however, and pour it into serving cups. That was it the recipe barley took anytime to finish and it tasted decent. I wasn't a big of fan as the rice pudding as I had originally thought but I'm still looking forward to trying the bread pudding.

This week I tried a few new things and it went alright. As I have started to cook more things I think that I need to begin to experiment more because the tastes that I’m looking forward to aren’t always there. I keep expecting a dish to taste one way but after using my recipe it taste completely different but that is a part of the experience so everything is still fine