Roasted Tomato Soup

This recipe for a roasted tomato soup comes from Gordon Ramsey. It is sublime. I chose the best looking organic heirloom tomatoes from Trader Joe's and stuck them in the oven with onions and garlic... the kitchen smelled amazing. Roasting is my go-to preparation for almost everything. It takes little effort and it's difficult to mess up. Just cut up the vegetables, toss with some olive oil and garlic and stick them in the oven for awhile. Shake the pan every once in awhile and take it out once it browns or softens. Easy!

My favorite way to prepare cauliflower is to cut it up and roast it with garlic, olive oil and sea salt. The cauliflower gets brown and crisp at the bottom and soft and garlicy everywhere else. This was another great tomato soup! I'm really glad I decided to give tomato soup another try because otherwise I never would've found out how much I love it.

Post roast vegetables.

Broccoli Garlic Quiche (round 2)

Round 2 with the Broccoli Garlic Quiche (originally from this post). Last time, I didn't do a very good job with the crust- I didn't roll it out large enough and when I blind baked it, I didn't have enough beans so the sides slid down a bit. This time I nailed the dough and it was awesome- thanks to my ceramic pie weights (yay!). But... of course my crazy oven went up and down 50 degrees so it came out to be more of an omelette with a pie crust than a quiche.

It was still good though, but it wasn't as fluffy or soft as it was supposed to be. It was definitely more than enough cream and butter for a month.

Potato Gnocchi (the 101st? post!)

I had gnocchi for the first time ever while volunteering at Food Rendevous, a great meeting of local food. A chef was demo-ing potato gnocchi and how easy it was to make and I tried some- omgggaahhhhh it was so good. It still had bits of mashed potatoes in it so it was soft, not at all what I thought it would taste like. I've avoided gnocchi for so long because I thought they were going to be chewy lumps of dough- that's definitely not the case! This recipe is great- the gnocchi were tender and had a very faint hint of potato.


I also got to use a potato ricer for the first time and I am now a converted ricer-lover. It make the potatoes so fluffy! This recipe was somewhat labor intensive, I spent just under an hour rolling and cutting the gnocchi. I youtube'd a lot of videos on how to properly roll a gnocchi on a fork... I think they came out more or less looking like proper gnocchi.

I served mine with a meat sauce (Trader Joe's spicy Italian sausage!) YUM! This would be perfect for the rainy weather in socal right now.

Chocolate Raspberry Cake and Honey Lavender Ice Cream

the elusive organic lavender

I had dinner at Fraiche a few months ago and the food was very good, but the dessert was mind blowing-amazing-awesome. I had a scoop of honey lavender ice cream- I picked it spontaneously. This ice cream tasted like a savory, subtle honey ice cream infused with flowers. It was so good- almost savory. I thought about that ice cream for a very long time and I found this recipe and made it and guess what... it tastes exactly the same!!! It took me 3 trips to different Whole Foods and Ralphs' to finally find some organic edible lavender, but it was worth it. SO WORTH IT.



And I made a huge chocolate cake. I didn't have raspberry jam so I used strawberry and it turned out pretty well (although I should really listen

Thomas Kellers' Simple Roast Chicken

Look at that crispy skin! I did it!

This post encompasses everything that this blog is for me: pushing my culinary boundaries. I had to stick my hand in a chicken! I don't know if it's evident in my posts, but I typically do not enjoy sticking my hand in dead animals. When I cook meat it's normally cut up already and all I have to do is open the package and dump it directly into the pan. I rarely marinate as that would require me to handle meat. I am terrified of germs/making someone sick and also very sad about the animal that died so I don't eat meat that much. BUT I love burgers and medium rare steaks so I'm not so animal friendly that I won't eat them, I'm just scared of them. But I forced myself to make this- every good cook should know how to make a roast chicken!

TK recommends slathering butter on the chicken as you eat it, but I felt that was unnecessary- I'm already cooking potatoes in chicken fat, do I really need to add butter?

I chose this recipe because
a) It's from Thomas Keller
b) It is really easy

And it was really easy! I kept checking the oven because it seemed too good to be true, but the chicken turned out juicy (without butter somehow) and the skin was so crisp (don't know how that happens).

I tried to be eco-friendly and bought a reusable silicone string to make up for all the paper towels I used to dry the chicken.

Oh and by the way, when you buy a whole chicken, it comes with it's NECK. aaahhhhhhhhh I was frozen for a few minutes and then started yelling NECK NECK MY CHICKEN HAS A NECK until my roommate yelled back to just cut it off and make some chicken stock. Ah thank goodness for Jer and his good sense. And this recipe does require you to use a lot of paper towels because you have to thoroughly dry the chicken.