Ok, so it's not cooking...

.... but I wanted to post photos of the finished blanket I made for baby Kaiya Horn.

The front of the blanket with God's rainbow as a border


A close up of the cross stitching



The back of the blanket

Upcoming Thanksgiving Dinner

It's that time of year when American families sit around the dinner table and gorge themselves on a typical thanksgiving meal.



The Barcomb family tends to deviate from the norm on this day. Last year we had Ham (usually a Christmas dish over here) as I want to save the Roast Turkey dinner for Christmas.



This year we are having Lamb! I'm also going to be making roast potatoes (a la Delia Smith), yorkshire pudding, broccoli and gravy.

Then on Friday we are going to be having ham with Joshua.

Trader Joes

Today Matt and I went to 'Trader Joes' a new 'specialty food grocers'. It's a chain that just opened it's first store in Omaha on Saturday.

The place was PACKED. Matt started to get grumpy about the number of people there until I reminded him that it was just like an Irish supermarket ;)

The store was nice and clean, but I wouldn't really call it a place that sells specialty foods. It was more that it sells off brands of regular food, has a higher amount of organic stuff and very little selection but a larger selection of imports than other stores.. Whole Foods Supermarket is much more what I would term a specialty food store.

Nevertheless, we bought 2 pizzas and a wild mushroom and black truffle flatbread. There are lot of little things I'd like to try from their, but most are foods that I'd serve when I have guests coming over. Then I just want to bung some stuff in the oven, toss it onto a serving tray and get loads of compliments for how nice it looks and how great it tastes ;)

I got very excited when I saw they had a large wall of cheeses, but was disappointed to see that about half of them were just different types of cheddar. Not a wedge of Wensleydale in sight!

Tonight for dinner I made some salad to serve with a couple of slices of one of the pizzas we bought.



The pizza was an organic woodfired sicilian style pizza with red pepper, provalone and peral mozzarella cheese. It also came with a small packet of olive oil with red pepper in it which was applied to the pizza half way through cooking to give it some spice.

The crust was delcious, reminiscent of crusts from France and Italy (the pizza is an import from Italy) but it was a little more crisp that they serve it over there. I think that was my fault.

Now I know you might think "Pizza? I thought she was trying to make her husband LOSE weight!" Well it's all about moderation. If I starve him and feed him nothing but salads he's not going to stick to it and is more likely to binge when he's in Indiana. So we had less than a serving size of the pizza and a huge amount of salad. Peaches were for desert.

So now it's back to 'cooking' for one until Friday, but that gives me time to think about what I can cook when Matt does get home. So I promise to have some great recipes to blog about next weekend!

Until then, as always, don't forget to kiss YOUR cook!

Who says there has to be meat in........ Ahi Tuna??

Well ME actually, it would rather weird to have an ahi tuna steak with no fish in it.

Anyway, my darling husband needs to lose weight (I do too, but for aesthetic reasons rather than being overweight). Over the years he has been slowly putting on more weight and always plans on losing it.

Well today I lost it!!! I told him that as long as he lives under my roof he can eat the food I make for him with no complaints!!

He does this anyway, but I haven't really been cooking in a way that is most conducive for him to lose his weight long term. Also since he started working out of state (and eating at restaurants twice a day) I haven't been cooking for him over the weekend because we go out for date breakfast, date lunch and date dinner. That gets uber expensive and doesn't help him in the slightest.

So no more!!

Tonight I made a seared ahi tuna steak and served it with a salad .

To dress the salad I used olive garden salad dressing, sImply the bestest salad dressing EVER.

I know I mentioned in the first blog post that I'm not a fan of salad dressings. Well this really is my one exception. It has the perfect balance of all the ingredients and tastes nothing like any other salad dressing I have tried in the past. It makes eating salad fun, and a small bit goes a long way; I used 4 tbsp of the salad dressing for the two of us and it would have been ok with only 2 or 3 tbsp.

The tuna turned out great. It was very easy, I just ground some pepper and sprinkled some kosher salt onto both sides of the steaks. I seared them in a small amount of olive oil for 2 minutes on each side. It was then time for eating! Yum :) The steak was slightly crispy on the outside and beautifully pink on the inside. It always amazes me how different tuna tastes when it is cooked. Raw beef and cooked beef taste very similar, but tuna really takes on a strong flavour when cooked.



Now I have to find something to cook for tomorrow. Matt leaves for the airport at 5.40pm and so I"m going to make sure I have an early dinner ready for him so he doesn't eat at the airport.

So stay tuned and, as always, don't forget to kiss YOUR cook!

Who says there has to be meat in....... chili

Tonights meal was another entry for the chili competition. This one was sent from Oliver in Wales.

The recipe requires

1 Pack of Quorn mince

1 tin of chopped tomatoes (none of that American rubbish, a nice decent no added anything British tin. Or Tesco Value)

1 large onion

2 cloves of garlic

Half a tube of tomato puree

Teaspoon of dried mixed herbs

Chilli powder (regular)

Fresh chillis

1 tin of Kidney beans

1 green pepper

Tabasco sauce

Cheddar Cheese (grated) – most important ingredient !!!

I was not able to find Quorn brand and so instead used morning star tvp crumbles. It was served with rice and I also additionally made some cheddar garlic scones too.

Friends came over for dinner tonight to try it. Some of them had also had the other chili I made at Halloween.

The vote unanimous: it was DELICIOUS!!!!
The tvp did not feel like a substitute that was merely acceptable. The taste and texture was great. The bell pepper added some bite to the dish and although tinned tomatoes were used it was NOT too much and therefore didn't have the acidic tang that I associate with tinned tomatoes. Mixing a serving with the rice and cheese at the table provided a really hearty dish, without the fat content of meat. Everything about the dish from the appearance to the taste and smell was a pleasure to experience. I shall definitely be making this chili again.

After talking to the people who had tried the last chili we all agreed that although the Jamie Oliver chili was good, this vegetarian chili was even better. So congratulations to Oliver, some Famous Daves BBQ will be on its way to you after the weekend!!

And, as always, don't forget to kiss your cook!!

finally, news on chili

And I'm not talking about those miners either!!

I made the first chili for the Halloween party we threw last weekend. It was a recipe submitted by Annalouise and is a Jamie Oliver concoction.

I used all fresh tomatoes (aside from the sundried ones) and I am very glad I did, the final product had a WONDERFUL taste without the processed salty 'tang'. The cinnamon stick, which I have never had in chili, added a certain sweetness to the dish and rounded out the tangyness of the tomatoes.

As it was cooking and before the beans were added I was a little concerned because it looked more like a spaghetti sauce than a chili. But once the beans were added it thickened the whole thing up.

One thing I will say is that I would have liked to have more meat in it and maybe another vegetable to add some 'crispness' and variety to the texture.

All in all it was a success, every party guest who tried it liked it! Furthermore when I took it out of the fridge a couple of days later and reheated some it tasted even better!!!! The flavours obviously had time to mingle :)

Thank you Annalouise for your entry, I will use this recipe again in the future :)

Next chili is a quorn based chili. Looking forward to trying that :D