Not abandoning this blog yet :D (also, Secondary Sensational Salad)

I hope everyone enjoyed their Wintersday vacation. I did not cook anything specifically for the holiday season, but before we left for the break my girlfriend and I whipped up a tasty salad coupled with some soup that was graciously delivered to us :D. We topped that off with a SUPER improvised microwave cake recipe which turned out to be delicious!

Even before we made the salad, my girlfriend whipped up some wonderful crackers with kiwi and Brie cheese. Very tasty to say the least.

After that she taught me how to make a good salad (yes, I do require instructions on how to make salad... everyone has to start somewhere). Preparing the lettuce wasn't too bad. After washing the leaves (about 6 total I think), you shake off the remaining surface water. You then can rip off any bad parts of the lettuce that you don't want to eat with your hands. After that you can just tear the leaves into pieces, not too small or too big, but the size that you would want to fit in your mouth. Then put it in the bowl as your base for the salad.

My girlfriend also taught me how to prepare the other vegetables for the salad. To make a nice cucumber for instance, after peeling, you can streak the sides of the cucumber with a fork for a nice design element.

Following this, she sliced open and scooped out an avocado onto the salad (cutting it like you would a mango seems to work very well). Then she peeled and diced a carrot and placed it on top of the salad.

So at this point it seems like my girlfriend did about everything :\ HOWEVER, i did manage to make the salad dressing :D. I mixed 1/6 a cup of vinegar, 1/8 a cup of soy sauce, 4 tbsp of water, 2 tbsp of sesame oil, and a thin slice of ginger finely minced. I then put these ingredients into a container and shook the dressing vigorously before pouring onto the salad.

And now for the rating system:

Time took to cook: 40 minutes (with the soup cooked as well)

Amount of help received: Buttload, I only basically made the dressing and learned from my gf how to prepare everything else.

Presentation (according to girlfriend): 3/5 (wasn't great...salad is salad)

Tastiness (according to girlfriend): 4/5 (very tasty)

I'll post again on the microwave cake once I get a hold of the recipe. I learned a lot this time and I think the next time I make a salad, I'll be able to safely do it on my own :D.

Thanks everyone!

-Stuart-

Whoa, I have a blog... (also, Primarily Perilous Pasta)

Hey people, I'm a person too! :D And like many people, I like to eat. More importantly, I purchase lots of food, but I never learned how to cook anything on my own. My girlfriend, on the other hand, can cook well and has a wealth of knowledge that far surpasses my own. Being particularly awesome, she has graciously agreed to guide me in my quest to learn how to cook. I one day hope to be able to cook a meal for her that will not require her help AND will actually taste good.

My girlfriend helped me out with this first dish. We thought that it would be fitting to make pasta as my debut dish. I found and borrowed elements from another blog that I saw (specifically, "Tuna and Caper Tomato Pasta" from Closet Cooking) and added some things that we had around the apartment as well (mostly because we had to improvise to due lack of ingredients or last minute problems we encountered). Specifically, we replaced olives with pickles (a very good decision actually), and added some tomato sauce to compensate for the lack of enough canned crushed tomatoes.

First, things first: we had to assemble all of the ingredients and cooking tools. We used half an onion, four cloves of garlic, two pickle spears, seven button mushrooms, one 14.5 oz of crushed tomatoes, a can of tuna, a pound of thin spaghetti noodles, and various spices. First I learned how to properly dice the onions without completely chopping my fingers off. Then we chopped the garlic and cut up some mushrooms without too much trouble.

Then we actually started cooking :D. We sauteed the onions (during which my girlfriend retaught me many times the proper sauteeing technique) until they were brown and soft. Then we added in the chopped garlic and some mushrooms, cooking them for about a minute. Then, in order to "deglaze" the pan (at first I was like wtf is that....but the internet is very helpful at explaining things), we used plum wine...though the recipe called for white wine. It smelled REALLY good at that point.

Here's where we hit the trouble spot. We added the tomatoes and pickles after letting the plum wine evaporate....but we quickly noticed that the small amount of sauce we were making would not be NEARLY sufficient to eat with the large amount of spaghetti noodles we had cooking. Re-reading the recipe, I noticed that we had a 14.5 oz can of tomatoes, where the recipe called for a 28 oz can... >.> ...damn... So, after frantically looking for a replacement for tomatoes, we found some much needed tomato sauce from the refrigerator and added quite a bit. After mixing and stirring for about 10 minutes, we added in the tuna and capers and let this sit for another ten minutes over medium heat.

Another lesson I must learn as a cook is to constantly taste my food to make sure it is progressing well as I cook it. After the last ingredients were added, the spaghetti sauce was quite sour, and not very savory. So, we added salt.....lots and lots of salt. Now, you must understand...this is some weird salt....it's the least salty salt you could ever imagine, so gratuitous amounts were required. Eventually it did become salty enough though, lol. Then we followed that up with some pepper and some chopped basil leaves, put this on the spaghetti, and enjoyed our meal.

Needless to say, this was quite frantically created with lots of apologies from me in between, but the dish was edible. The pickles and capers combined made the sauce taste pretty unique...quite a bit more sour than other sauces I've had before, but not overpowering. Then again, my senses are pretty dull as they are, and I'm not the IMPORTANT judge of my cooking.

Here are the stats for today's meal:

Time took to cook: 1 hr

Amount of help received: Tons, advice and criticisms on almost everything I did

Presentation (according to girlfriend): 3/5 (I mean, how else do you present pasta, lol)

Tastiness (according to girlfriend): 3/5 (It was ok, it wasn't bad)

So overall, not so bad, but I still had TONS of help from my girlfriend. It was pretty tasty, and I didn't cause any physical harm to anyone around me or break anything :D Things to remember for next time: don't mix various tomato sauces together....or more importantly read the recipe and remember the amount of ingredients that you need.

Thanks people!

-Stuart-