Home: To Cook and Be Sane

I have been working 6 days a week the past two weeks. I have lived in a hotel this past week and stayed awake 26 straight hours to complete a project started in December of last year. After I slept for 13 hours, all I wanted to do was cook, at home, in my kitchen, with my stuff. I wanted to eat with non plastic silverware and on non styrofoam plates.

In true Cook Crook fashion, I opened the fridge and the pantry and created a dish: asparagus and pancetta pasta. I found a loaf of garlic bread in the freezer and popped the cork on a chianti. Honey, I'm home.

Cook Crook Technique: Blanching

I know I mentioned the brown butter asparagus in my brunch post, but I also promised I would share how I started blanching my vegetables, like asparagus before storing them for cooking. Thanks to Cooking Light's Most Common Mistakes feature, I will never have brown fresh veggies again! I have no idea why I am so late to this party, but I have to say, glad I decided to do this when I bought 3 pounds of beautiful asparagus!

Step 1: Start with a beautiful bunch of fresh veggies...

Step 2: Add veggies to a big pot of boiling salted water and cook for 2 minutes.

Step 3. Plunge the cooked vegetables into ice water. This is another case when my large pot with the insert was helpful. I just pulled the insert from the boiling water and plunged it into another stock pot I had filled with ice water!

That's a pretty green!

Step 4: Store! Gallon plastic freezer bags are always a must!

Not too hard right? So again, why did it take me so long to do this??

Thanks again Cooking Light!

Appetizer Alert: Asparagus Wrapped in Prosciutto Improvised

I love making appetizers and consequently I love having a reason to make lots of little bites and dips and such. Usually it revolves around some sort of sporting event when I am not making appetizers to entertain. On a particular evening, with our dinner plans no longer possible due to a very obstinate preschooler, I decided it would be fun to make snacks for me and the hubby while he...umm we...watched college basketball. We had gone grocery shopping that day and there was fresh asparagus on sale as well as prepackaged prosciutto that was in the deli.

In a cooking class several months ago, we had made prosciutto and puff pastry wrapped asparagus. I made them for my family over the holidays with just the prosciutto, no puff pastry, much like the recipe found on Food Network. So that evening I set about making prosciutto wrapped asparagus. Imagine my surprise when I opened the prepackaged prosciutto to find 6 slices of said meat. So now what?

Well, conveniently we had also purchased some deli baked ham that day and because I knew the ham would not have the salt and fat properties of the prosciutto to cook the way I wanted, I decided to improvise and add crescent rolls. Below is the result....and they were gone in a flash!

If I made them again with the ham for company, I would personally add a little spicy mustard before wrapping them in crescents. One can of crescents did 20 pieces of asparagus with still some dough left over (and I probably still used more dough on each one than necessary). Same principle as pigs in a blanket, just cut the dough into the strips. I cooked everything at 375 degrees for 13 minutes. Just be aware that the prosciutto only asparagus will put off a little oil when cooked so in the future I wouldn't cook them on the same pan.