Here, Home, Hope

I just finished this book today. Here, Home, Hope by Kaira Rouda. It was a great read and inspirational. I highly recommend it. :)

Veggie Soup

I threw this soup together tonight. No recipe. I just put some veggies I already had (onions, mushrooms, zucchini, green beans, and cabbage) in beef broth and added tomato paste, garlic, pepper, oregano & Italian seasoning. I did cook the onion, mushroom and garlic for a bit before adding all other ingredients. Yum yum!

Where We Belong

I finished this book a couple of days ago: "Where We Belong", by Emily Giffin. Great book! And it went by super fast! Highly recommended!

Hot Turkey Sandwich Deliciousness!

Well, I haven't been cooking a whole lot this week since I caught the flu. But today I went to the Sammamish Cafe and got one of my favorites: hot turkey sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy. Comfort food at its finest! :)

Honey Sesame Chicken

I tried out this Honey Sesame Chicken recipe today via Chef in Training: http://www.chef-in-training.com/2012/04/crock-pot-honey-sesame-chicken/

I had 3 packets of sesame seeds left over from the BBQ pork that I bought at Costco last week. So I tried to put them to good use and found this recipe. It's super easy to make (I did the 3.5 hour on low in the crock pot version), tasty and even my 4 year old gobbled it up (though he said it was soooo spicy that he has to take a drink in between each bite). The recipe on the site was for the doubled recipe. I "undoubled" it.

Lazy Sunday

Well, we had a lazy Sunday. We had leftover soup for dinner. And we went out to lunch at Trapper's Sushi. My favorite roll ever is the "Mt. John" (see pic). My mouth waters just thinking about it. Mt. John's description: "crystal shrimp covered with tuna & octopus, topped with spicy cooked scallops, green onion & tobiko". Heaven. :)

Breaded Mushrooms

I tried out a recipe that I found on Pinterest for Breaded Mushrooms today.

Here is the link to the recipe: http://notecook.com/side-dishes/breaded-mushroom-recipe-2/

Breaded mushrooms seemed easy enough to make and sounded delish, plus I had all of the ingredients on hand. But then the weirdness began. Nowhere in the recipe does it say what to do with the parsley. I just added it in to the cheese/breadcrumb/spices mixture (which is probably where it should have gone anyway). The really odd thing about the recipe is that you don't put anything on the mushrooms to make the cheese/breadcrumb/spices stick to them. Therefore I rolled them around in the mixture, but really ended up scooping as much of the mixture onto the top of the mushrooms as I could.

The ranch dressing that I used to dip these little suckers in was tasty. This was the first time I've used the Marzetti Simply Dressed Ranch (all natural dressing).

They were edible if you are a mushroom fanatic like myself. But I will not be making this recipe again. Please also note: These look NOTHING like the picture on the link with the recipe either. I hate that.


Before they were cooked:

After:

Tasty new dressing I discovered:

Ready to serve:

Here we go!

Well here we go!! I am offically popping my blogging cherry. People kept telling me I should blog and I just kept putting it off because I didn't want to deal with it. Now here I am. :) I plan on blogging about all the cooking I do (I do a lot...a good portion of it is soups), recipes that I find on Pinterest that either turned out good...or failed, foods that I find extra interesting and/or delicious when I go out, and the books that I read. Hope you enjoy! :)