Food For Thought

Food is a hot subject these days with cooking shows seeming to take over television and bloggers trying out new recipes and cookbooks for a year. Spending most of the last 5 years without a cookbook its hard to imagine needing one anymore. I've even gotten to the point where I look up a recipe and think "that would taste good" and make it with only half the ingredients called for and substitute the other half with random fillers and not even bother to measure any of it! For instance, today I was wondering if I could make a peach crisp with only three small peaches, and then remembered that I also had a couple of apples, so I looked up a peach and apple crisp recipe, saw that those flavours went well together and decided to make it... not having nearly enough ingredients for the full flavor I added things and left some out. No flour, so I ground up some oatmeal in my blender and used it instead. Not enough peaches and apples, I added some zucchini. Hardly any brown sugar, I added some white as well.

For those of you who are stuck back at the zucchini part, let me expand my thinking! When I was about 11 or 12 we had a HUGE garden and that year we decided to plant zucchini and see how it would do. Well, we had enough zucchini to last us a life time!!! The whole family ended up looking for ways to use up the zucchini! We ate plenty of zucchini loaf and started grating it and freezing it. Then my wonderful sister-in-law found a recipe for appless apple pie, which called for zucchini instead of apples! It was amazing! The texture was a little off but the flavor was great! The lesson learned, zucchini takes on flavor very well! Having learned that lesson at a young age I add zucchini to a lot of recipes when I am short on ingredients.

The result is a very tasty crisp, once again I have out done myself with hardly anything in the kitchen!!!

Last night was an experiment that turned out ok but not as good as planned. I decided to make tropical-ish chicken. Chunks of chicken baked in a mango sauce with pineapple chunks. I would have worked better if the mango's would have been ripe! Hate to leave you hanging, but I have to run and cook dinner (eggs and potatoes, nice and mindless and easy!). I will try to write more tomorrow.

The last 5 months, plus three more!!!

The last 8 months have been busy. There was working at a fast food restaurant while pregnant (right up until 8 months) cooking a Thanksgiving dinner all by myself and getting a nasty bug and having to talk my husband step by step through finishing that dinner! Travelling to BC for a visit spending an extra week there and then taking a bus back to Ontario (for any of those how may be pregnant and thinking of travelling, take a plane or car, don't listen to the man and his "cheaper" logic!) having a roommate in an already small basement suite, making Christmas dinner all by myself, feeling like a beached whale on my couch, packing a hospital bag, unpacking it to find clothes that fit, packing it again and then on the day you go into labour realizing that you forgot to put important things back in it, like your toothbrush! Realizing half way through labour that it is going much faster then you ever thought it would and then thinking "I should've taken the painkillers when I had the chance!", at least it didn't last long (5 hours from when I woke up to holding the baby!). Moving upstairs came next (trying to lift things and climb stairs two weeks after having a baby and stitches that didn't want to heal, not recommended), then the roommate moving out without any notice on the day rent was due... the only time you should let a good friend move in with you is when you want to see just how good of a friend they really are!!! most of the time they aren't that great of a friend, lesson learned, now I just got to learn an easier way to learn these lessons!!! Somehow we are surviving without a roommate in a place that we really shouldn't be able to afford with no family around and not a lot of friends around either. I will have to admit that it is nice being on our own sometimes though, as much as I miss my family and friends on the other side of the country, we now have to fend for ourselves and learn how to spread our wings as we throw ourselves out of the nest!

Now my son is waking up so I should go tend to him and I will try to post a little more often to keep all updated on the life and times of the Busch residents!