I Owe It All to Rachael Ray.

Really, I do. When I was really, really stupid about food, Rachael Ray took me by the hand, led me to the kitchen and said, "Really, it's not that scary. Let me show you." Okay, maybe she didn't ACTUALLY take me by the hand, but she very figuratively did.

When I realized how much I needed to learn to cook, I turned on the Food Network and got very, very scared. Here were all these people making fancy, fancy stuff with ingredients I'd never heard of. (Lest we forget, I knew not what a green onion was, so things like polenta and risotto were way beyond my reach.) Then I found Rachael Ray. "Hey," I thought, "She reminds me of every best friend I've had since I was about 15. I think I can speak her language." And then she started making burgers. Burgers! I know burgers! I can do burgers! That's when I knew we would be friends for life, if only in a one-sided, through-the-TV sort of way. Like all good friends, we've had our ups and downs, me and Rach. Sometimes I wanted to throw something through the TV and tell her to stop being so persistently HAPPY all the time. Couldn't she see that I was in a mood and she was annoying me? Then I realized, that no, she can't, and her job kind of depends on her being happy, and eventually we'd make up. Sometimes I strayed from her down-to-earth food to covet the more gourmet offerings of the other chefs. But I always came back. She had me at hello.

It was Rachael Ray who taught me about formulas vs. recipes, and even emboldended me to create my own recipes. Before her, I was amazed at the powerful recipe-creating powers of all those cookbook people. Now, while still amazed, I understand that it's actually easier than I imagined. With Rachael's persistent encouragement, and her daily reminders that no one is going to come to my house and inspect my chopping methods, cooking has become less of a mystery and more of a hobby. Someday, I hope I can run into her in the grocery store so I can say, "Look! Look at my cart! I have ingredients in here! Ingredients to make meals because I know how to cook, and you helped!" At which point she will probably be a bit scared and walk away at a quickened pace, and the tables will have turned and I will be the happy one, yelling after her down the aisle, "Wait! I have to tell you about my meatloaf recipe! I made it up! All by myself! Aren't you proud of me? Rachael? Hello?"

Anticipation

Can I just say that I LOVE Thanksgiving? I start dreaming about it in the summer. Then all the pie-making and turkey roasting accoutrements are put on display at the grocery store, then Thanksgiving-themed Food Network shows come on, and by the time November rolls around it takes all of my willpower to keep myself from "testing" recipes for stuffing and pie and sides and desserts- and by "testing" I mean "making and consuming all by myself". I cannot wait. There is only one week to go. I hadn't really thought about it, but I think Thanksgiving could be tied for my favorite holiday. What's not to love about a day full of cooking and eating and eating again because hello, it's Thanksgiving?

This Thanksgiving is especially exciting because, well, the last have been kind of disappointing. Three years ago we went back to see le hubby's family and we ate at a restaurant. WITH NO PUMPKIN PIE. Two years ago most of my family went up to my mom's for turkey, but we weren't able to go, so we went to my sister-in-law's family's thing. The food was good and they were very nice. So why would I complain about that? Well, because I was pregnant and all I wanted in the world on Thanksgiving were my mom's insanely good rolls. Hey, don't judge me. I am not ungrateful or ungracious. I did not complain ever... to them. Well, at least, not until now. But the fetus demands what it demands, and it was demanding mom's rolls. They were pregnancy cravings, people. Big, aching, mouth-watering pregnancy cravings. I HAD NO CONTROL. So, yes, the lovely gracious people who invited us to their lovely absolutely-nothing-wrong-with-it-except-not-having-mom's-rolls Thanksgiving dinner disappointed me. Sorry. I am evil. No, wait, I was PREGNANT, in case you forgot. Try it sometime. But, I digress. Last year Thanksgiving was being held across town. After I spent the day preparing my portion of the meal, my eight-month-old came down with a very high fever. Now, I love her, but again, the rolls. The year before I was having very vivid dreams about baked goods thanks to said child's incubation, and now she would be keeping me from them. For the love.

So, I am excited about this year. I'm not sure whose home I am going to, but my mom's rolls will be there. As will pie. And stuffing. Halle-frickin-lujah.

Ladies Who Lunch

Every other Tuesday some of the women (Girls? Ladies? I never which category I fit in to. I mean, I guess at 26 I'm a woman, but still.) in our ward get together for "lunch group"- kinda like playgroup, but with food, and you don't have to have kids to come. I actually thought about doing something like this back in Vegas, but never really got up the motivation to do so, and couldn't imagine 20 kids tearing around our little townhouse. I'd crack. Anyway, when the weather was nice we would go to a neighborhood park, and now different women take turns hosting it. The only rule for lunch group is you have to bring something to share. No specific something, there's no sign up for main dishes and appetizers and such, but somewhow it seems to work out very well every time.

Bonus? Turns out one woman in our ward is writing a cookbook (and tests her delicious recipes on the group), one is part of some cooking group- and we again get to reap the rewards-, and a third is opening a bakery and needs people for tastings. This is me, in freaking heaven. It's like I landed in the midst of some sort of amazing food trifecta. The only thing that could make it better is if someone said that her aunt is Ina Garten and she will be joining us next time. I think I'd have to die immediately after said next time, not only from the heart attack brought on by her creamy buttery food goodness, but because I surely would not have another meal that decadent in the rest of my life. It'd be kind of sad for my family and friends, but if I could visit them from the grave, I would say, "The only thing you should be sad about is that you didn't get any of that food. Seriously. I died HAPPY."

Per Jamie's Request

Here is my banana bread recipe, which is actually my mom's banana bread recipe, although I have taken the liberty of tweaking it.

2 c. sugar
1/2 c. oil (vegetable or canola)
2 eggs
3 c. flour
pinch of salt
1.5 tsp baking soda
2/3 sour milk or buttermilk
5 mashed bananas

Mix sugar, oil and eggs until combined.
Stir in dry ingredients.
Add milk & bananas, mix to combine.

Bake in greased loaf pans at 350 degrees for one hour. Makes 2 loaves. Do not add nuts. This is not banana nut bread. If it were, I would have said so.

To make sour milk, add little white vinegar to perfectly good milk when you start this recipe and let it sit until you need it. Voila! Sour milk.

Here are my tweaks:
*I always use whole wheat flour for 2 of the cups of flour. No one has ever noticed and it seems to make the bread more substantial.
*When mixing the wet ingredients, I pour in some vanilla (probably around a teaspoon), cinnamon and nutmeg. I don't measure, just pour until it seems like enough. I play around with other spices, too, but cinnamon and nutmeg are ALWAYS in my banana bread.
*I don't mash the bananas all the way. I like to have some gooey banana chunks in the bread.
*I usually use a couple of bananas that have been frozen (and are now thawed). They turn into this gross-looking banana liquid when they thaw, but it makes the bread really moist. (When my bananas are starting to get past the point where we'll eat them, I just put them in the freezer, in the peel, and save them for banana bread time.)

There you have it. This is my version of my mom's banana bread. It's kind of famous.

Oh, How I Love Thee...

Rotisserie Chicken. I bow to he or she who at some grocery chain board meeting said, "You know what would be a good idea? We should offer hot, juicy, delicious rotisserie chickens in our stores." Yes, yes, you should, brilliant grocery store board member. And the masses will thank you.

Rotisserie chickens are a staple of our diet. We buy a gihugic one at Costco every week (for only $4.99!), and it feeds us for about three meals. On the first night, we usually have it with potatoes or rice and vegetables. Night two, every week, is fajitas. Day three lunch is leftover fajitas. But the possibilities do not stop there, my friends. Rotisserie chicken is like the, well, it's like chicken- really, really versatile... BUT YOU DON'T HAVE TO COOK IT. So it's better than chicken, even though it's chicken. You follow me?

Other fabulous things to do with rotisserie chicken: chicken enchiladas, chicken salad, chicken on salad, stir-fry, chicken noodle soup, chicken and whatever else soup, goop (a delicious cheese-and-chicken concotion we eat over rice), chicken stroganoff, chicken in pasta... the list goes on.

This is why I love rotisserie chickens. This is why I cannot live without rotisserie chickens. The word chicken is starting to sound very strange to me now. Chicken. CHICKen. chick-en. If I was Oprah, I would sing it very loudly, "CHIIIICK-EEEEEEEN!" And then I would give everyone in my audience a plate of delicious rotisserie chicken goodness and a certificate to the finest rotisserie chicken makers in the world, to have hot, juicy, delicious rotisserie chicken perfection sent to their home every week. You're wishing I was Oprah right now, aren't you? (Sigh) Yeah, me too.

Happy Experiment

Tonight was one of those nights where you look in the fridge and everything looks uninspired. You don't even really have ingredients for a meal, just eggs, milk, cheese and fruit, and a fruit-and-cheese omelette is out of the question. I don't know if they're ever in the question, but that's so not the point. So I looked in the pantry and was met with pasta, more pasta and cans and cans of beans. I was thinking it would be a cereal for dinner kind of night because I'm getting pretty sick of spaghetti, when I was reminded of the few episodes of "Pantry Raid" I've seen, where this chef goes into people's homes and makes a fabulous meal out of whatever is in their pantry and fridge. So I decided to play "Pantry Raid".

After looking at the endless cans of beans, I remembered eating a delicious black bean soup at a restaurant last year, so I headed to the internet for black bean soup recipes. Naturally, I didn't have the ingredients the recipes were calling for, so I decided to wing it. That's what all the best cooks do, right? (Also all the cooks who give their guests food poisoning, but it's best to look on the bright side.) My experiment turned out to be surprisingly good.

Here's my very own black bean soup recipe:

2 cans black beans, drained and rinsed
1 can vegetable broth (or whatever broth you have)
1 can diced tomatoes (mine had zesty chiles in them, but you could use whatever tomatoe-y product you have... tomato sauce, tomato paste, salsa... you get the idea)

Olive oil
1 half of a monstrous white (or yellow) onion, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, finely diced
1-2 tablespoons cumin (to taste)
A few shakes of red pepper flake
Black pepper

So, take one can of black beans and the vegetable broth and puree it in the blender. Put that mixture and the remaining black beans into a medium/big pot over medium heat.

In a skillet, heat a couple glugs of olive oil (I'm so precise, aren't I?) and the onion over medium heat. When the onions start to get translucent, add the garlic, cumin and red pepper flake. Stir it around and let it cook a few minutes, then stir it into the pot with the black beans. Drain the can of tomatoes and add to the soup. Add black pepper to taste. Cook over medium heat for 15 or 20 minutes until it thickens up a bit (you can always add more liquid if you want it soupier, or strain a little out if you want it thicker). Serve hot.

I put a big spoonful of sour cream on top of ours, but it would probably also be delicious over tortilla chips (or smashed taco shells) and shredded cheese, or with quesadillas. If you try it, let me know what you think, or what variations you used. Yay for kitchen bravery!

My Quest

I love to make bread. I realize it's not necessarily cheaper than buying it, and it's certainly far more time consuming, but I enjoy doing it, and as far as I'm concerned, few things in the world are as heavenly as a slice of bread hot out of the oven.

I am a whiz at banana bread and I have a very good white bread recipe, but have yet to find that perfect, soft whole wheat bread recipe. I've tried several, but each one seems to be worse than the last. The cookbook that gave me my white bread recipe has a whole wheat bread recipe in it, and everything I've made in this cookbook has been good thus far, but I have a problem with this particular recipe. It calls for powdered milk. I know what you're thinking: so what? I'll tell you what.

When I was a kid, we had to endure the cruel and unusual punishment of drinking powdered milk. When we ran out of milk, we didn't go to the store to pick up another gallon, we pulled out a box of powder, mixed some with water, and voila! Milk... if that's what you want to call it. It is nasty, nasty, nasty stuff. Do you know I didn't know milk came in gallon jugs until I was about eight? I never drank milk at my friends' houses (Kool-Aid was our drink of choice), so I just didn't know. Anyway, when I saw "powdered milk" listed as an ingredient in this recipe, my first thought was, "Do they even make that stuff anymore?" and then I felt my throat begin to close in rebellion to even the mere thought of it. Still, I thought I could probably find milk of the powdered persuasion and try the recipe.

I went to the store, and found it on the baking aisle, where I cleverly thought it would be. After being shocked that it was $3.00 for a box that would make three quarts (is there really that high of a demand for dehydrated milk?), and then being annoyed that I would end up with a bunch of leftover powdered milk, especially if I didn't end up liking the bread, I went to pick up the dreaded box. As I lifted it towards my cart, I had to stop. I couldn't do it. I couldn't buy it. What if someone thought I was making my child drink this? What if someone came to my house and looked in my pantry and saw it? It would be so shameful. If you never had to drink it, year in and year out, you can't possibly understand. There were flashbacks. It's like I have post-traumatic stress from the fake-milk of my developmental years. I have PPMD. Post-powdered-milk disorder. I put the box back. It took a few minutes for the sweat to evaporate and the dizziness to go away, but after a few deep breaths and a quick escape from the baking aisle, I felt much better.

I'm still looking for a good recipe, though.