I'm The Next Top Chef

Has anyone else been watching Top Chef Masters this season? If not, last night the 6 finalists were each asked to create a signature meal. Suzanne Tracht of Jar in Los Angeles made for her signature dish Chopped Sirloin on Toast with a Fried Egg and Green Peppercorn Sauce. And I started practically screaming at the TV, "We made that!" It was a about two years ago, but I of course still have pictures!

Suzanne Tracht's Chopped Sirloin on Toast with a Fried Egg and Green Peppercorn SauceThe recipe is from Nancy Silverton's A Twist the Wrist, but the recipe is credited to Suzanne Tracht. So the next time you watch Top Chef in awe and think, "I could never do that," well guess what? You totally can!

~Shoshanah

P.S. I won't be having a Frozen Thursday tonight since the boy decided to make red beans and rice. He said it made it the right way instead of the shortcut way he normally does, so I'm excited!

P.P.S. Anyone else excited about watching the premiere of Real Housewives of Atlanta tonight?

Herb & Garlic Potatoes

I had almost forgot, but Classy In Philadelphia wanted to see the recipe for the potatoes I made. The recipe is from The Little Black Apron which is a cookbook aimed at the single girl, which means most of the recipes are given for a single serving. I made more potatoes than it called for and just used the amount of other ingredients that seemed right. Overall it was really easy!

Herb and Garlic Roasted New Potatoes
1/4 lb baby new potatoes (about 4 or 5) or use any potato you'd like
1 to 2 cloves garlic thinly sliced
Salt & pepper to taste
1/2 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon chopped fresh Italian flat-leaf parsley
1/2 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary
1/2 teaspoon copped fresh thyme

1. Heat the Oven to 500*
2. Rise and pat dry potatoes, and cut into half or quarters (you want them all to be around the same size)
3. In a baking dish combine potatoes, garlic, salt, pepper, and enough olive oil to coat the potatoes. Cover the dish tightly with foil. (I mentioned this when I wrote about the meal earlier, but we just used a baking sheet and didn't cover them and they still turned out pretty good.)
4. Roast for 40 minutes, or until potatoes are fork-tender but not mushy.
5. Toss the hot potatoes with the herbs in the baking dish.

Really easy I think and really yummy too!

~Shoshanah

A Relationship Story

I love reading every one's stories about how they wound up in their relationship. I started thinking about it and realized I've never posted that story here myself. I do remember someone asking if part of the reason I moved to Louisiana was because of him. The answer to that is definitely no. I have already posted the story of how I wound up in Louisiana and if you read that (here) you'll see that no boy is mentioned, so how did it happen?

If you read the story about why I moved to Louisiana, you'll know I came her to go to grad school for math. One of the classes I was taking at LSU was combinatorics. Basically a fancy name for saying counting, but counting weird things like "If you had 1 banana, 3 oranges, 2 plums, and 6 apples in a bowl and you pick 3 pieces of fruit, how many different combinations of fruit can you have?" Do I lose everyone by posting a math question?

Back to the story. I can be really shy in large group situation, and while it wasn't a huge class it was large enough for me to be intimidated. Which means I didn't really make an effort to make conversation with the people in the class with me. Instead before class I would always bring a copy of the newspaper to read or to do the sudoku. (A bit off topic, but one of the things I liked going to a school the size of LSU was they published a student paper everyday! Which meant new things to read everyday! A little different from my liberal arts college publishing a newspaper around once a month.)

Back to combinatorics, since I'm talking about this class in particular you might have guessed that the boy was in this class as well. If so you'd be right. A few weeks into the the semester I was leaving the class room as normal at the end of class. Except the boy stopped me and the door and said, "I don't think I've ever seen you talk to anyone the entire time we had this class."I laughed and responded saying something about "not talking to strangers" and pretty much walked away as fast as I could to avoid having to say anymore.

Yeah, I'm not really good when I'm being confronted or put in awkward situations so I really didn't know what else to do. Clearly, that wasn't the end of our relationship, since we'll have our 3 year anniversary this fall. Maybe eventually you'll get the rest of the story from me!

~Shoshanah

Adventures in Cooking

I've been craving pancakes for a while now, and actually bought blueberries to make blueberry pancakes a few weeks ago. Except I didn't have any flour. This weekend I remember to get flour, but the blueberries had since been eaten. So instead of making blueberry pancakes we went with plain pancakes, which are still really good. I used to recipe The Breakfast Book which is the recipe my mom used to make pancakes when I was growing up. We actually halved the amount, because normally when I make them for the two of us we have far too many leftovers. By making only half we had 8 pancakes which was the perfect amount. (It actually made 8 plus 2 more that I flipped too soon and weren't really good all the way.)

Then for dinner I decided to be the devoted girlfriend I sometimes am and cook dinner as well. I was planning on making green beans, but Fresh Market didn't seem to have any. Since none of the vegetables really looked amazing I just decided to make a salad instead.
This is my go-to salad. I buy one of the pre-made mixes (this is fresh herb mix), I cut up some fruit (this has white nectarines), and I include a little cheese although the only cheese I'll use is feta or parmesan (this one had feta). Also this time I threw in some chopped pecans for fun. Then I'll just drizzle some olive oil and balsamic vinegar on top. (I wasn't actually too big with the nectarine feta mix, I did make it with parmesan for lunch today and like it a lot better.)

For a side I made Garlic Roasted New Potatoes which comes from The Little Black Apron. These were really simple to make, except we don't really have a roasting pan so I made them on a cookie sheet. Although they pan was supposed to be wrapped in aluminum foil to keep the heat in, but we didn't have any of that either. The potatoes still turned out pretty good, I had to cook it a little extra, and you can tell some potatoes were more cooked than other, but it still worked.

For the main course I went with salmon. The recipe I used was also from The Little Black Apron. It was Maple-Dijon Salmon, which called for dijon mustard and maple syrup for the glaze. (Good think I already had maple syrup from the pancakes!) Except we had honey-dijon mustard, so I didn't use all the maple syrup suggested, mainly for the boy's benefit since he's not a big fan of sweet things. I would have been ok if it was a tiny bit sweeter. As it was he didn't eat much of the sauce since it was too sweet for him.
This was actually my first time ever cooking any sort of fish. I do like fish, but always felt a little too intimidated to try to make it. I normally stick to chicken and pasta. I was really surprised at how easy it was to cook, and how much I enjoyed what I did cook. I would totally make this again. Although to be honest the boy says his piece was a little undercooked, but mine was fine. They were different sizes, and I told him to put it back in the oven since I hadn't even had the chance to turn it off yet. Clearly, it wasn't undercooked enough for him to do that, and he still ate the whole thing. I think it all came together pretty, what do you think?

And for dessert? I had my first ever Larabar! I was really surprised at the consistency of it. I assumed it would be more grainy like a granola bar, but the major consistency was actually dates. And the flavor? Also a surprise, I had a lemon bar (see?)
and I was really surprised at how lemon-y it tasted. I've been hearing they taste just like what they say they are and its true, it tasted just like a normal lemon bar (and I love normal lemon bars). I would easily try more of them, anyone have a favorite flavor I should try next?

~Shoshanah

P.S. If anyone is really curious to see the recipes for anything above let me know. I figured this entries long enough already, but would be more than happy to post them if you really want to see.

Away We Go

We didn't have a lot of movies to pick from this weekend. We saw The Ugly Truth last weekend. We really didn't want to see G-Force. We were willing to settle for Orphan. But lucky for there was a showing more than one movie showing at 4:40, and since I've been wanting to see this movie since it came it in limited release, well Away To Review!

Away We Go
I do think I over hyped it. I was so looking forward to this and had such high expectations that it really couldn't quite met them. I still enjoyed the movie overall, but it wasn't quite there.

In general the movies seems to put the two main characters in awkward situation after awkward situation. If you like seeing people in awkward situations then you'd probably enjoy this, but it just felt awkward to me. There were two major laugh out loud moments. But the rest of the movie wasn't necessarily funny, but more a laughing because you feel like you're in an uncomfortable situation and you're not sure what else to do. There were a few romantic scenes at the end I did like.

Normally at this point I'd give ideas about what to go see instead of this. But honestly, I'd classify this as almost a romance, and there aren't a lot of romantic type movies out. (I'd say its as much as a romance as Garden State is a romance, and thinking about it now there are a lot of similarities between this and Garden State.) I won't necessarily go out of my way to see it again, but I definitely don't think it was a waste of money. The boy on the other hand, well let's just say I don't think I could EVER get him to watch this with me again.

Moving to a different note, the season finale of The Bachelorette is on tonight! I know I haven't written a lot about it this season, but I'm thinking Jillian's going to choose Ed, although it wouldn't surprise me if they're already broken up on the renunion show.

~Shoshanah

Favorite Books: Children's Style

Recently me and the boy had to buy presents for his niece's 2nd birthday. (Her birthday and party are next weekend.) We were told to buy "outside things," so we wound up buying a bubble mower and for fun threw in a few extras. We probably could have been done there, but I felt we needed to buy her some books. I love books now, and clearly that came from somewhere because I have fond memories of so my books from my childhood. It was hard to pick out just one of two. I can only imagine the number of books that I'm going to wind up buying whenever we do finally have children (which is most definitely several years away). So without further adieu some of my favorites, some you've probably heard of, some maybe not.

Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans
Pretty much a classic I think, and I'm sure pretty much everyone has heard of this. I think its a book pretty much every little girl should own.






The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton
Another classic, although I think a little less well know. Basically its the story of a house in the middle of the country. Except cities slowly encroach onto the house, and instead of being a new house full of sunshine it gets a little run-down and the tall building block out the sun. And of course since its a children's book at the end the house it bought by a family who moves the actual house back out to the country.

The High Rise Glorious Skittle Skat Roarious Sky Pie Angel Food Cake by Nancy Willard
I LOVED this book when I was little, although I think it might be out of print now. I will say if you ever do see this book you should look through it. I love the pictures and love the story, and of course it includes the recipe for High Rise Glorious Skittle Skat Roarious Sky Pie Angel Food Cake so you can make it yourself.

Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney
Yet another award winning book. When I was little we just called it "The Lupin Lady" book. Even now anytime my mom sees lupins she points them out to me and I think of this book.

I could easily, easily go on. I mean just listing a few titles there's Blueberries for Sal, Where the Wild Things Are, and of course Goodnight Moon, but I would probably be here forever.

Now of course, here are the actual books we wound up buying for her!

The Little Engine That Could
We did actually by the board book. I figured that since she'll only be 2, she's not quite at the age to really appreciate an actual book. And I figured a board book might be a little bit safer. Of course I didn't realize till I brought it home that the board book I bought is actually an abridged version! Seriously! They have to abridge children's books even shorter? But I guess the essence is still there, although if I had known I might not have bought it. And if you want to know the actual book was written by Watty Piper.

A Baby A Sister For Frances by Russel Hoban
I loved all the Francis books, and I'm pretty sure I had them all. And since the birthday girl will become a big sister in October I figured its fitting. She will be having a little brother, but I had a little brother and still had this book. I figured its still a good choice.

Anyone else have any children's books they look back on and remember fondly? Or if you have children now, do you have any favorite books you like reading to them?

~Shoshanah

Ranchero Beans

Kashi's Ranchero Beans
Part of me remembered not liking this the first time I tried it. So I was a little reluctant to buy it, and once I did buy it, it sat in the freezer for a while. But I hadn't ever blogged about it, so tonight I went for it.

Surprisingly, I liked it! (I think maybe just the name is what I remember disliking. Even now I feel a little silly admitting I enjoyed eating ranchero beans.) I thought my favorite part was going to be the red pepper because in general its one of my favorites. But it wasn't. The red pepper was still really good. I just liked the pinto beans more. They were the perfect soft texture, which is impressive considering its a microwaved beans and beans don't always reheat very well.

The overall verdict, I'd probably buy it again. Although maybe Kashi would let me change the actual name on the box?

~Shoshanah