I'm baaaack!

OK, I'm back! For now. I think I'm getting my groove back again. I've had lots of fun cooking foods this past week, so you'll see 3 or so posts from me tonight :-) We'll see how I feel next week. I've been busy.

My son is off to boarding school in Sweden. :-( But he's doing great over there! So, I am finding myself with a lot more time. More time to cook, I guess, so I've been Googling recipes on the web and tweaking them a bit.

Now, I'm starting to get my days mixed up a bit, but here goes:

I bought three fresh pasta boxes from Trader Joe's because my husband was like, we need some pasta around here, and here I am trying to go gluten free. So much for that. Anyway, I bought a couple of fresh pastas from Trader Joe's.

On Tuesday, we had the mushroom ravioli. But we needed a sauce for the mushroom ravioli, I thought. I found the perfect recipe from Tyler Florence on www.foodnetwork.com. Cream mushroom sauce. Oh, it's heaven! Because I had double the mushrooms, I doubled the recipe. I didn't have any leeks, well, I did, but I don't like leeks, so that's that. The recipe didn't call for any marsala wine, but I decided to add marsala wine. Here's my recipe for mushroom cream sauce:

16 oz frozen mushroom mixture from Trader Joe's
1 pint heavy cream, preferably grass-fed
Salt & pepper to taste
Marsala wine to taste
Dried minced garlic to taste
Dried minced onion to taste
2 TBSP butter, preferably grass-fed

In a cast iron pan, I melted 1 TBSP butter, put in the frozen mushrooms, garlic, and onion and let the mushrooms thaw and the liquid evaporate a bit. i then added the cream and the wine and the salt & pepper and let it cook up a bit to desired consistency.

I think that's it. So simple. I need to double-check the recipe.

Note to self: Don't write blog posts when you're hungry!

Anyway, served the mushroom sauce with the mushroom ravioli. To die for! Plenty of leftovers, too!

On Wednesday morning, I decided to make an omelette of 2 eggs spiced with basil, parsley, salt & pepper, and add asparagus and rosemary ham. I wanted goat cheese or Boursin, but I had neither, so it had to be Muenster instead. But then I got the brilliant idea of using some of the leftover mushroom cream sauce. O-M-G. Yum! This is a keeper recipe, for sure!

For Wednesday's dinner we had the spinach tortellini with the ever lasting mushroom sauce. That sauce is so good!

Last night I made a meat sauce with grass-fed ground beef and served it with the cheese tortellini. Made a lot of leftovers, so for brunch today I cooked up a bit of cauliflower and put some of the leftover meat sauce on there. So good.

Oh, and last night I even roasted a whole chicken. I used Ina Garten's recipe on foodnetwork.com. But I didn't have any of the fresh spices she had in her recipe. All I had were dried spices. So being the mad scientist I am, I did not measure any dry spices and put them inside and outside the chicken. No big deal. I think I put on too much spices, though, and I think I overcooked it a bit. It's a bit dry. Oh well. Anyway, came out awesome.

Tonight I decided to buy two different salads, goat cheese, and pistachios. I was still kind of full from the meatsauce and cauliflower I had for brunch today, so I wanted something light. I decided on salad.

So tonight's recipe:
2 salad mixes
homemade vinaigrette dressing
beets, quartered
pistachios
goat cheese
sliced chicken (from the chicken I roasted yesterday)

See how versatile my week in the kitchen was?! Now if I could only plan things better...

I think that's it.