A New Beginning

I love cooking fooding, reading about food, talking about food and especially eating food. Food blogs have become my escape lately. Reading how others are successful and sometimes not so successful in the kitchen inspires me to create and experience cooking "outside of my box." I could sit and talk about food all day long and I know those that I sometimes trap into these conversations probably don't always want to be there, so I thought I could write about it and hopefully it will provide me with some of that joy without making my friends listen to me go on and on about my most recent experience in the kitchen.

My biggest challenge will be to remember to take pictures of the food I cook. I tried a new recipe tonight, Baked Green Chile Chicken Enchiladas(by Reeni), that turned out quite tasty but I forgot to take a picture until after we had devoured half of the pan.

I have been cooking and baking constantly for the last couple weeks. I have been on a huge pumpkin "kick" and have been making everything pumpkin. Everything has been sweet so my next challenge is to try a savory pumpkin dish. There are many pumpkin pasta recipes out there and that might be my next adventure. My husband and son are surely getting sick of pumpkin but they will be okay. I'll find a new ingredient to obsess over soon enough.

Last weekend, Cameron and I made our first homemade pizza dough. It turned out so yummy that we are going to try to make a habit of making our own pizza rather than ordering out. It is so much tastier, healthier and cheaper and we can make it however our hearts desire. The whole wheat pizza dough recipe came from Culinary in the Desert.  I sauted some onions, mushrooms and red bell peppers and cut up some chicken and spinach sausage I had grilled a couple days before and threw it all on the pizza with tons of mozzarella cheese and we had some delicious homemade pizza. 

I actually baked my first real loaf of bread this past week. Yeast and all. I have always had this great fear of working with yeast breads, mostly because it is a long process and I don't typically have that kind of patience. I found this blog that has inspired me to get over that fear, Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day at Big Black Dog.  This group is going to be baking their way through the new book starting in January.  The recipe for pumpkin pie brioche has been released this month as a sort of teaser.  The dough was so easy to make.  I have made two loaves of bread and still have some dough left that I think I am going to attempt to make cinnamon rolls with this weekend.  The bread turned out pretty tasty, but I definitely needed to slather on some butter before eating.  That kind of defeats the purpose of  healthy bread but, oh well.  :)