I hate cooking, but love home cooked food

Trying to set the mood with pretty kitchen ware. 

Notice coffee and chocolate chip cookie in picture below ...these are my vices and reasons to cook; to stop consuming cookies as dinner, not to mention cooking home cooked meals for Andreas, Leopold and Flora. 

First attempt at cooking a white bean and chicken chili. Doesn't look bad, haven't tried it yet.  Eek. 

Roast beef...closure

Here are a couple of pics of the delicious pot roast. Andreas, husband 'o mine, loved it so much, he asked if we'll be having every month. That, I told him, is very ambitious.
Looking at the pictures again though, maybe I will be making it sooner than I thought.

Pot Roast Part II

Stop procrastinating and make the damn pot roast already!!  You are already 35 minutes off your schedule!

Late supper already.  Remind me to update you about the fun and time-consuming aspects of building a house are.  Quite apart from having a two-year-old and a five-month-old, building a house is very energy sapping.  Imagine those who don't have young kids and are trying to build a house...well, actually they probably have jobs then that will consume their energy.  It's tough.  And I'm still not making my roast, SO!

Will update later.  Maybe even with a picture.

Now 39 minutes off....

Pot Roast

Okay, we're gonna do this.  We're gonna make a pot roast tomorrow for dinner.  I have a "Classic Pot Roast Meal Starter" from Robert Rothschild Farm brand.  I'm gonna buy a four-pound chuck roast, some onions and carrots and I'm gonna roast the heck out of it for 4 hours at 275 degrees.  

Some of you may know, most of you will not know, that I am a failure at cooking certain dishes.  Macaroni and cheese has eluded me since the first time I tried to make it as a babysitter back in 1992.  I just threw everything together and the powder cheese didn't exactly melt with the macaroni, or I think you're supposed to take out the macaroni and then add the butter and milk and then the powdery cheese, hmgh, ...I don't know.  It just didn't turn out and I think I made the kids eat cereal that night.    

Or take the spaghetti incident back in my college days.  I was trying to be sweet to my roomates and make them dinner, but gosh, what did I do, mixed the sauce with the noodles and then just mashed in some ground hamburger beef and it was simply a non-tasty disaster.  

Now, pot roast, my ever elusive nemesis, I will conquer you.  I have made some pretty tasty mac's n cheeses and spaghetti's since then, so now it is the pot roast's turn.    

My father, who loves to tell me the prices of every available meat on sale at the supermarket that week, tells me time and again how to make a proper roast.Even goes so far as to tell me step by step details on how to roast the roast, which somehow I manage to forget or probably just tune out.  It's not that I don't want his advice.  His pot roasts, and my moms', are some of the best I have ever tasted.  Which is why I want to figure this out.  I've even made a roast in their presence, learning, seeing and believing that it's not difficult.

At their home it works.  At our home, not so much.  I let it cook too long, or I don't give it enough time or maybe I roast it on the wrong temperature.  Perhaps it's because I don't salt the meat before I brown it.  But this time, I think I've got a really good recipe and a really good chance of making it right.  

I'm going to start at 2:15 p.m. and put some olive oil in my dutch oven.  Then I'm going to let it get really hot.  OH WAIT!!  Oh No!  My husband just reminded me that the cleaners are coming tomorrow afternoon.  GREAT.  Hmmm, this puts a bit of a wrench in the works.  My plan must be delayed by a day.  

Stay tuned, lovers of roasts, I will come back and update you.    

Year of Something's

I have finally done it!  I have finally used a recipe from a cookbook that I have ordered from the library several times, over the last couple of years, and loved reading so much, who likes to read cookbooks anyway?!, that I ordered it from Amazon and it sat on my pretty cookbook stand for months before I actually bought ingredients for and physically made the recipe in the oven, woooh, I did it.  

"Roasted Beet and Potato Salad" from the book, are you ready?..."The Roasted Vegetable," by Andrea Chesman.  

Now, don't stop reading, I'm not going to turn this blog into a blog about going through this recipe book and making a recipe a day for a year and have some incredible epiphany at the end of it.  

No, no.  I have many topics I would like to discuss and generally get off my chest.  Other topics include, but are not limited to, exercise, crafting, children, husbands, girlfriends, family!, grammar (or lack thereof), politics (we might dip into that) and anything else that might pop into my head.

Well, it is a little bit of an epiphany, actually.  I mean, I'm not a cook, nor do I aspire to be one...at all.  I do like buying stuff from Williams-Sonoma, but then again, I do like just buying stuff in general.  Cookware, flatware, ballet flats, I love it all.  My husband and I have a nice routine going;  I find the recipe, buy the ingredients and have it all ready for him to cook it, and by golly, he then proceeds to cook the recipe.  Also, I should put it out there that I am from Minnesota and as such, I was raised on meat and potatoes.  So, this whole vegetable side of cooking and eating veggies is a bit foreign to me.  But, after having first a son and now a daughter, I feel it is my responsibility to MAKE them be healthy eaters!  

I know healthy eaters, even those who exercise regularly, will still get cancer or diabetes or die young or fall down the stairs in their home that they've lived in for like 70 years or so, but I've decided eating vegetables certainly can't hurt my kids or my husband...or me, for that matter, and veggies taste good, so this is my Year of the Vegetable Dish...or Year I Made Vegetables; Some I Had Never Heard of Before! year.  

Hey, my friend, who is a serial dater, always has a Year...the Year of the Asian, for instance, or Year of the Spaniard.  I know, very un-PC, but, a little funny, right?  Especially because he's gay and knows no boundaries when dating or talking about his dates.  If you have a lisp, you always get away with more.  Cheeky.

When I was training with my friend to run a marathon about ten years ago, it was the Year of 5ks, because that's what we would do every Saturday morning for one summer, thinking we were going to be gold for the Twin Cities Marathon that fall.  Lo and behold, it was not the Year of the Marathon, but, I, a drama kid in high school-not athletic by any definition of the word, was very proud of myself for being able to run...well, walk mostly, jog sometimes, 5ks during that summer.  And, for the record, could do it in about 20ish minutes.  Heavy on the "ish" bit.  

So, you see dear reader, my Year of Something is really not a trendy thing to write about.  I've had Years of Somethings for a long time now, and have been surrounded by them as well.  This is a sincere effort at just writing about my life.  Hopefully it will be a bit entertaining for you and cathartic for me.