Chicken and Veggies

Since I like to cook, as has already been established, I've decided that I'm going to broaden my post topics to that of food as well.  I really enjoyed sharing my experience of baking my cake for Thanksgiving and I gotta figure that someone out there will probably appreciate similar posts.  Also, I recently watched Julie & Julia.  Fantastic movie, if you haven't seen it, you should.  Anyway, moving on, I recently got a Pinterest account, one of those things that I'd heard about for ages and actively avoided because it was so popular.  Well, I caved and I have discovered a whole new fantastic world.  Not even kidding, I love it.  One of my friends has been griping at me because I've been pinning so much and blowing up her Pinterest board.  Whoops!

Probably the most exciting thing I've found for me is all the recipes.  There are so many!  I'm trying not to collect too many so I don't overwhelm myself with all the possibilities.  Since I had yesterday off of work because I was up until 4 am watching the midnight premiere of The Desolation of Smaug, more on that in my next post, I decided to cook dinner.  And since I was cooking dinner, I figured it would be fun to try one of the recipes I'd found on Pinterest.  And so was born the idea that whenever I tried a new recipe, I could blog about it and let other people know if it was really good or bad or if I'd done something differently, etc.  So if you like to cook, I hope this is helpful and fun and if you don't like to cook then maybe it'll inspire you to bust out the pots and pans and make something yummy.

Caramel Apple Cake

For Thanksgiving this year, I decided to go ahead and bake the dessert and try something new.  A month or two back I had picked up an issue of Food Network magazine.  It had some really good recipes in it, but the recipe I really wanted to try was this cake that had been made to look like a caramel apple.  It was absolutely amazing and it was rated as easy, so I figured it would be something fun to make for Thanksgiving to kind of shake up our normal menu.  Since I had to work Thanksgiving, I made the cake the night before.  The recipe said that it would take about two hours, but with it being my first time, I figured it might take more like two and a half to three.  It took five.  For all that the recipe said it was easy, it was not.  I'm guessing it was rated easy because you made the cake using box mix instead of from scratch and there weren't all that many ingredients.  Actually building the cake though was far from easy.

Back To School?

Okay you see that picture.  That could be me in a couple years.  Well, not the food, but you know, the hand garnishing that amazing looking dish.  Okay, I'll give you some context so you can stop looking confused, or if you're not looking confused, well, then, I don't know.  Anyway, since moving back home, there are times when I'll flip on the tv, not very often, but on occasion when I'm eating or doing something in the kitchen.  Most of the time there's nothing good or appropriate on so I've taken to watching Food Network, because, hey, I like to cook and bake and its always interesting to see what other people are fixing and get some good ideas.  My parents noticed this since I fix dinner a couple days a week and usually when they get home that's what I have on.  As we were watching one of the shows while having dinner a week or so ago, my dad made a comment that I should consider going to culinary school since I like to cook so much.  I was a bit surprised, because, well, culinary isn't exactly one of the "practical" college degrees that my parents used to always suggest I go for.  Now don't get me wrong, I know my parents have always had my best intentions at heart when they suggested those practical degrees, but I know I could never do something like business or accounting or even something like being a teacher.  No, no, no.  I would die of boredom or in the case of being a teacher, I think I would lose my mind trying to deal with kids.  I like kids, I think they're cute and all, but I only like them from a distance if I don't know them.  The only kids I actually like dealing with are ones that I know and even then I don't think I could do that everyday unless they were my own.  But that is in the far distant future and not something I'm going to worry about right now.