MY New Summer Side!

The more I cook, the more adventurous I find myself becoming. I have always been willing to EAT anything, my hesitation was sometimes making something outside my comfort zone, but over time I have been more willing to experiment. Many of my ideas and new cooking adventures lately have been coming from the various cooking magazines I subscribe to. My favorite magazine recently has been Fine Cooking, a magazine recommendation that came from my good friend and fellow foodie, Kandice. Not only are the recipes interesting and delicious, the instructions and pictures make you feel like you can make everything in there. (It may even convince me to do more baking!)

The latest issue, has a wonderful section on "The New Summer Side" , how to create your own grain salad. This was a perfect example of something I have eaten many times and enjoy, but have never made myself.And this is where Fine Cooking excels, they don't just give you one recipe, they give you a CORE recipe you can build on and several add-in options that allow you to create your own combinations using the various ingredients.

For my first foray into making a grain salad, I decided to go with one of their recommended combinations with only a change to the grain (their recipe called for Basmati rice, I went with brown rice). The suggested combination was a dressing of rice vinegar, sesame oil and ginger with add-ins of mango, cucumbers, scallions and cilantro.

The most critical step in my mind was cooking the rice. I have a microwave rice cooker that my Chinese and Filipino aunt gave to me 15 years ago but I wanted to take no chances on the proper cooking so I followed the instructions to the letter. The rice came out great and my biggest challenge was not having a fine strainer big enough to properly rinse and drain it so I had to do it in batches.

Once the rice was done draining, it needs to be spread out to cool:

The rest of the recipe is a snap. Some chopping, some wisking. The article is absolutely correct that perfecting the dressing is a matter of taste. I salted, peppered, added more sesame and tasted at various intervals until I found the right combination. Frankly, I was thinking about what other things I could pour that dressing on! The final product was beautiful, light, and delicious:

I made this for one of my best friends when she and her kids came over for an impromptu cook-out and it was a huge hit. We are having our annual start of summer get-together next weekend and this will certainly be on the table. Now I look forward to experimenting with other grains and combinations!

Steal of the Week: Cake and Ice Cream Sandwiches

I am all for easy baking since baking is neither my strong suit nor something I am patient enough to practice on a regular basis. Baking is also challenging in the summer so imagine my delight when I came across this blog post for Cake Mix Waffles from a blog I recently began following: http://www.cometogetherkids.com/

What was even BETTER was the idea to make these delicious waffle shaped pieces of cake into cake and ice cream sandwiches! This was so incredibly easy and I tried it out on my good friend Ingrid and her kids to no complaints....and there was the quote form my step-daughter " I like these better than the ones we get from the store". So clearly....these are genius!

This could not be any simpler...favorite cake mix into waffle maker and voila:

Not all of them got made into sandwiches I will admit and my husband was already imaging the frosting options:

I used frozen vanilla yogurt as a healthier option than full fat ice cream and it worked great. I agree with Laura about adding chocolate chips being a great idea and Ingrid was dreaming up ideas of chocolate ganache. I look forward to making these again.

Link to Love: CosmoCookie -Why Else Do I have a Cast iron Skillet but to make this??

Doing my nightly food blog perusal and came across this one for Jalepeno Beer Cornbread....enough said!


CosmoCookie ...making the Universe a little sweeter: Jalapeño Beer Cornbread: I have returned from Mexico! Some friends and I headed south of Tucson until we hit the Pacific to get SCUBA open water certified. It was...


Although, if you add bacon to that equation that may be my own personal heaven right there...just sayin'


Check Out CosmoCookie!

Reflections of a Wayward Blogger

Our breakfast destination on our anniversary weekend away

I have missed my blog but I have missed cooking too. You read that right, I have missed cooking. I "gasp" did not even do a meal calendar for May. It has been THAT bad! My entire Spring has been nothing but chaos at my real job and at home. When I got back from Arizona it was like I walked through the wormhole and began inhabiting crazy town on a regular basis versus the life I was so familiar with. I questioned whether I still wanted to blog. I thought does anyone even notice I am not blogging, or care? Do I care? I would sit down to write and 100 other things would come up because I was not dedicating the time. And I was not dedicating the time because I believed I could not spare it. By default, I was not cooking composed meals as much. Our family and work schedules were driving us to eat out more because I did not have meals planned. I did not have meals planned because I believed I was too stressed out to plan or think up a menu that would work with our busy schedules. Then I found myself counting days to our next family events as a way to keep me going at work and just thumbing through the various issues of different cooking magazines I have delivered every month. My heart was not in it but I thought all I needed was to finish my class, and refocus at work and I would be able to breathe. It was a nice thought but even after the class ended, the craziness did not.

Then the other day, I was barely paying attention to an episode of American Idol when I saw the commercial for the new season of Master Chef and I remembered how excited I was about cooking and food. I was so excited that I dragged my friend Kandice to Washington D.C. to AUDITION FOR A REALITY TELEVISION SHOW , to audition for that exact show! I did that and it seems like a lifetime ago. I began thinking about what was different then compared to now. And then it hit me that this person writing this blog gave up because it was too hard. The same advice I give my son "keep trying, don't give up" (conveniently put into a catchy song by Yo Gababa Gabba I might add) I failed to heed myself. I had some opportunities related to this blog and to cooking that fell through over the past few months and I let my disappointment derail me.

The other thing that changed was my perspective which in turn affected my priorities. My paying job provides for my family and as my husband says often "it is what it is" but I have been letting the stress and the subject matter impact my entire life outside. I forgot that planning meals and cooking menus with 50 ingredients is therapeutic for me. I forgot that I cook because I love doing it and I write about cooking because I love writing too. And those two points were critical as I remembered that this blog was created for me to do something I love.

So the Cook Crook has returned once again. I will make no promises about what I will write about or share but I am still always open to readers comments, questions and ideas. I cannot promise I will always have a step by step recipe or repeat an idea or two, but I will continue sharing what I love, food and cooking and every great idea I can snag from this adventure they call life. And if you are new to this blog, consider yourself lucky....you have a writer on hand who now remembers why she writes and plans to do it often.

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. ~ Thomas Edison