Thursday, July 26, 2012

A Change of Plans

I made it 6 months without changing any of my 50 adventures, so I figured it was about time haha.  On the original list, the adventure is to make 10 Julia Child's recipes.  The whole point of the adventures is for me to do things I want to do to keep myself busy.  As I thought about this challenge, I realized it really didn't appeal to me at all.  I have no desire to learn French cooking, and I don't really have any connection to Julia Child's (I fell asleep halfway through Julie and Julia, although that's not saying much, since I pretty much fall asleep during every movie....and tv show...and football game).

Hence, I am changing my adventure.  Instead of cooking 10 Julia Child's recipes, I am going to cook 10 recipes from the Joy of Cooking cookbook that my dad got me for Christmas a few years ago.
This is pretty much the Bible of recipes.  It's over 1,000 pages of recipes for just about everything.

On Tuesday night, I got a craving for meatloaf.  Brief side note on meatloaf....when we were kids, my step-sister and I loved meatloaf.  My brothers, on the other hand, couldn't stand it.  One night, my mom gave the boys the option of eating spaghetti instead of meatloaf.  This was completely out of character, as we were expected to eat what we were served.  We all went into the kitchen to see what was up.  My mom pulled out a margarine tub full of spaghetti....and NIGHTCRAWLERS!  She had seen a news segment about soldiers somewhere eating food contaminated with worms, and she thought it would be a funny joke.  After that, Ben and Michael were perfectly happy to eat their meatloaf.  

Anyways, back to my craving.  I looked on-line for a good recipe and couldn't find anything that sounded right, so I figured I'd go the old-fashioned way and look in one of my physical cookbooks.  It's been a long time since I've cooked from a cookbook and not just off of Pinterest.  The Joy of Cooking had a good-looking meatloaf recipe, and an hour later, I had meatloaf.

Classic Meatloaf

All ingredients in the bowl

Making a mess

The recipe called for breadcrumbs or quick-cook oats.  I didn't have bread crumbs, so I tried the oatmeal...very good!

Into the oven....

....and out of the oven

My finished meal
  I wanted mashed potatoes to go with it, but figured I would try mashed cauliflower as a healthier alternative.  BIG MISTAKE! It was disgusting.  I followed the recipe from Pinterest, and seasoned it with salt and pepper and butter, just like mashed potatoes, but it was still pretty terrible.  I ate what was on my plate and dumped the rest in the garbage.

One recipe down, nine to go!

No comments:

Post a Comment