What I've Been Cooking and Eating

Here are some photos of what I've been eating the last few weeks. Get inspired and get cooking!

I am on a big oatmeal kick. Lately I've been adding cinnamon and ground flaxseeds for extra flavor and nutrition. Perfect on a cold morning.

Best afternoon pick-me-up of the month--fresh raspberries.

Egg-wrap/burritos--one of our weekly staples that usually appears when all leftovers have been eaten. Accompanied by sour cream, guacamole and salsa, it's a wonderful weeknight meal.

Homemade chicken enchiladas, made with a bit less spice than suggested. We made these last Sunday and ate them throughout the week. Delicious homemade dinner on the table in 5 minutes on a weeknight = happy family.

What I've been cooking

Here are some photos of the food I've been cooking this past week. Get inspired and get cooking!

Blueberry cobbler inspired by Ree Drummond's Blackberry Cobbler. I've been reading her blog for many years, but just started watching her new show on The Food Network. Best. New. Food Network Show. Ever.

Broiled chicken breast (boring but sometimes under-rated), boiled green beans (with Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter, of course) and Veggie Fried Rice (from the frozen aisle of Trader Joes--a nice discovery while the hubby was away last weekend).

Spinach-basil-walnut pesto. This will dress up any meal. Pasta, chicken, sandwiches, eggs, a piece of dry bread.

Sushi Making Class

Hi there. How've you been? I feel like it's been forever since I've written, and a lot has transpired since that last lunchbox I packed for my daughter back in June. As I alluded to last month, my husband and I signed up for a sushi making class that we took several weeks ago.

Let me cut right to the chase: WE HAD THE BEST TIME! I'm so glad to have discovered a wonderful little culinary school called Chef Eric's Culinary Classroom.  Our teacher was none other than Eric himself.  He's a very likeable guy and has an interesting story of how he entered the culinary field.  I do have a particular interest in career change stories, so I enjoyed hearing his. But onto the class.

Chef Eric taught us all about sushi for the first half of the class and conducted a few cooking demonstrations, which we could see perfectly, thanks to the mirror above his table. I learned some very interesting tidbits, most notably that real wasabi root is generally $100+ a pound!  Lucky for us, Chef Eric found about $30 worth of it in the market that morning so we got to taste it. I didn't realize, but I guess most of the time in sushi restaurants, we aren't eating real, pure wasabi root.  I'm not entirely sure what we're eating, but I definitely tasted the difference.  The real thing is much more subtle than anything I've ever had in a sushi restaurant. To be honest, I like both "forms" of wasabi, but had no idea where it came from. 

Then we moved into the kitchen to cook. We made sushi rice, pickled ginger (a personal favorite) and then prepared our very own sushi rolls and sashimi.  It was well into the 9 o'clock hour at this point and both Jeremy and I were definitely hungry and tired, but still having fun. By about 9:30 we finally put down our knives, washed up and stood around a beautiful table of sushi that our class made together. 

This was merely a sampling of the sushi we made (there was more)

I've got to be honest, I wasn't expecting it to taste as good as what we've enjoyed at sushi restaurants. I don't know why, but I wasn't, and boy was I wrong. It was delicious!! None of us could believe that we'd made this ourselves. But we did. And it was good.

I'm not going to say that sushi will become a part of our weekly rotation of family dinners at home (buying sushi-grade fish at 4 in the morning isn't top on our priority list), but I certainly learned a lot of neat cooking tips.  For example, I'd always struggled to get the skin off of fresh ginger when using it in stir fry recipes, but struggle no more. I learned the proper technique, which is to use the dull side of the knife and simply scrape it against the skin going in the opposite direction of it. Just like that, it comes off. Brilliant.

All in all, our sushi making class was a fun thing to do together, a great way to start the weekend and a true lesson in appreciating the work that goes into beautiful meal preparation.

Homemade sushi (no fish yet)

Where to begin. We've had a hectic last few weeks so let's just say that I haven't been doing a whole lot of inspired cooking. I have, however, been doing my share of retail therapy and included in my recent expenditures was signing up for a sushi making class with my husband. I thought it would be something fun to do and given what's transpired since signing up, I guess he does too.

A few Thursdays ago, I called Jeremy on my way home from work to figure out what we were doing for dinner. "I thought I could make sushi," he said. "Seriously?" I said to myself, thinking there is no way we can go shopping for sushi ingredients, figure out how to make it, actually make it, and put this all together before it was time to give Emily her bath and put her to bed. But I bit my tongue because I sensed some enthusiasm on the other end of the phone. "Okaaay," I said in a quieter voice than usual. "Do we have what we need?"

"Yes, I got everything today during a quick lunch break," he said. "I thought we could do it with tofu, just to practice," he said. "Okay," I replied, kind of warming up to the idea that I didn't have to cook dinner.

Fast forward about an hour, and I was delighted to find myself eating spontaneous homemade sushi, and watching Emily pop edamame out of the pods. The dinner turned out so well, in fact, that my husband treated me to it all over again tonight. And I took some pictures.

Since we haven't taken our sushi making class yet, you'll notice that we have none of the right tools, and we're missing a few key ingredients such as fish. While some might not dare eat un-traditional sushi, I have to say, our vegetarian version was absolutely exquisite! Not to mention, I think we both feel more comfortable waiting for our class to learn how to buy sushi-grade fish before trying it at home.

As you'll see in the following pictures, Jeremy made our sushi with grilled tofu as the protein, brown rice, avocado, cucumber, panko, spicy sauce and some sort of rice-vinegar sauce he made from scratch that I never would have even known was a part of sushi. It was awesome. Not to mention, watching his enthusiasm in the kitchen melted my heart.

No doubt, we're both very excited about our class later this summer. In the meantime, some pics.

Remember, we have no sushi tools yet (I thought the magazine was pretty crafty - he used it to roll the sushi) Super yummy, right?Cutting our rollsFinished product