Gourmet Goals and Cooking Confessions

Too often, chefs and even homecooking food bloggers portray an image of being perfect gourmets who can improvise with ease, conquer any recipe and are experts in all cuisines. I don't want to do that here. I intend to show you that no one is without fault and everyone has big goals, even in the kitchen!

So I have a few personal cooking confessions, palate prejudice and gourmet goals to share with you.

Cooking Confessions

• I struggle with multitasking. Too often, I get too ambitious and get overwhelmed cooking. This is one of the reasons I love make-ahead entrees or Crock Pot dishes that take care of themselves so that I can focus on other elements. 
• I can be really shortsighted with cooking. I'm not really creative when left to my own devices but I do feel really confident in my ability to follow a recipe - probably too confident. I think that everything will be much more simple than it is. 
• I can be recipe gullible. I know what makes for good flavor combinations but I often assume that all recipes that get air time must be good. This is dangerous and is the impetus for J's "one Pinterest recipe per meal" rule...
• I'm forgetful with ingredients. This is probably why my skills of improvisation are improving - because I think we have 2 cups of mozzarella but we actually only have 1, so I have to add Parmesan, cheddar and feta to meet my needs. 
• I make assumptions about local grocery stores. I assume that most ingredients are readily available and hopefully in appropriate packaging and price points or I don't fully understand my ingredients - that's what caused the Canned Salmon meltdown of 2012 (who knew it had skin and bones in it?!?!). Another moment to be a better improvisational cook!

For some common cooking mistakes, look here at Real Simple's suggestions to fix food flubs. 

Palate Prejudice 

Here are a few of the ingredients/flavors I despise and try to avoid as often as possible when cooking or eating:

• Fennel/ star anise/ licorice - just why?
• Cilantro - in large quantities, I think it tastes just like soapy dishwater
• Strong liquor flavors - I'm not far enough away from my college drinking (read: vomiting) days to be able to appreciate strong booze again
• Raw, seed-filled tomatoes - I love tomato products and tomatoes without "guts" but I can't stand that slimy stuff!

Gourmet Goals

I've been cooking since I was a kid and have tried a number of types of cuisine and methods of preparation but I still have some goals for dishes and techniques that I want to master. 

• The Art of French Cooking - I've made her Bouef Bourguignon, but I want to try more of Julia Child's French recipes (minus the aspics)
• Savory and sweet souffles - I made one in a rush on Valentine's Day and it was so-so. This dramatic dish needs to be perfect
• Southern staples - most notably fried chicken, biscuits and cornbread
• Perfect knife cuts - if you asked J, he'd probably say my knife skills are irregular at best, insanely dangerous at their worst
• Homemade pie crust and pasta - two of my most favorite carbs!
• A signature cocktail - I know I said I don't like strong liquor flavors earlier, but I do think having a good knowledge of what to order at a dinner or what to shake up at a party is an important grown up skill. And rumor has it, some drinks don't taste just like nail polish remover - if you make the right, you might just enjoy them! 
• Knowledge of meat cuts - I get the poultry ones and some basic red meat cuts but I have no idea what the difference is between various roasts in terms of texture, flavor and cooking needs but also where they are located.
• Food photography for this blog - I know that's petty and probably has a lot to do with both the lighting in our house and my sub-par phone camera but to convey the best food to you, I need to work on my pictures and art direction. J's the artistic one and takes better food photos but I'm trying! 

I shared these tidbits with you as encouragement. Everyone - chef or not -is a work in progress in and out of the kitchen and we have to keep that in perspective. We all have things we like and don't like, no matter how flexible a palate we have; things we want to accomplish and faults to work on. I hope our blog gives you encouragement and shows you that the thing that drives good meals is a passion for food and sharing with folks you love. 

Expanding "following options" for Endlessly Delicious Life

We're happy to announce that we've expanded your options for following Endlessly Delicious Life!

You're welcome to religiously check for updates on our website, but you can also follow us by e-mail by entering your e-mail address into the box to the right of this post. You will receive notifications of any updates and new posts.

Also, we're available on the social media trifecta. You can follow EDL in the following places:

• On Facebook as Endlessly Delicious Life Blog  - Here we'll be able to do up-to-date posts and will be able to post and organize more photos (and add videos). Also, we'll easily be able to link up with other businesses, organizations and services for projects, reviews, interesting articles and giveaways. Join the community to share in the wealth of media! And invite your friends to "like" us, too.  

 

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• On Pinterest as an Endlessly Delicious Life food and drink pin board. Pinterest has a wonderful ability to allow you to organize your favorite ideas, plans or inspirations. Here we're sharing our recipes and have intentions to share reviews for products and lists of hot tips. You will be able to pin these to your own boards and share them with your friends and fellow pinners - in a sense, this allows you to customize our blog to suit your needs and uses.

 

Please follow us and share our platforms with your friends! We will continue to offer steady coverage of the food world and the food on our table, but we hope that this will allow us to share more information with you from us and other sources, as well. Our goal is for us to be able to interact with you more - we want to hear from you - so please comment on our posts; re-tweet us; shoot things to #EndlesslyDeliciousLife on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter; like our links and share your own and more! 

Bringing New Life to Leftovers

I love leftovers, especially holiday leftovers that are wrapped and stuffed in a number of packages and cram-packed into the fridge.

When I was younger, on Thanksgiving Day my parents and I ate lunch at my mamaw's house with some twenty-odd cousins, aunts, uncles and adopted family members. And I always looked forward to dinnertime that night, when we'd drag ourselves into the kitchen, exhausted  and would eat cold turkey, mayo and mustard sandwiches on white bread and I'd eat Jell-O fluff by the spoonful. That was the best part of the whole day!

As I got older, and our celebration became a little more disjointed and we started having our primary meal at my parents house and I'd cart my own menagerie of Tupperware back to mine, I loved re-creating the meal over and over.

I am a creature of habit - almost disturbingly so when it comes to meals. Left to my own devices, I'll master a dish or flavor profile that I fall back to repeatedly. For example, almost every weekend that Jordan's working, I make nachos or quesadillas for lunch. Do I have the ingredients for practically any dish? Sure. Do I have the capability to follow a recipe and create a successful noon-day meal? No doubt. But time and time again, I haphazardly dump Latin ingredients (salsa, guacamole etc.) and chopped up protein leftovers (chicken tenders, pot roast...) onto Santilla corn tortilla chips and nuke it for 90 seconds. Como se dice "deja vu" in espanol?

With that being said, I get a sick pleasure out of reheating duplicate Thanksgiving plates on Friday, Saturday and if I brought big enough Tupperware, Sunday. I recreate the plate dish for dish, I want the turkey, the dressing, the cranberry sauce over and over.

However, I do like to reinvent my leftovers too and today, I think I made a good dish. Jordan was at work today and doesn't like dark meat turkey, so I knew I'd be nibbling on that to leave him his favorite parts for dinner. As mentioned before, my fail-safe is Mexican cuisine so I made the most delicious quesadilla with leftover smoked turkey, shredded sharp cheddar and brie! I may try this again and do just brie and a spread of cranberry sauce, but today I took it in a decisively Mexican profile (go figure).

Despite my sub-par sour cream (I'm a snob) and a lack of guac, this quesadilla is one of my better improvisational lunches. The brie elevated the whole dish - there's melted cheese and then there's melted brie - this gave it a much smoother texture with more gooeyness than stringy meltedness. I think the cheddar contributed more flavor, but the brie added a contrasting texture to the crispness of the tortilla. The turkey, which my dad had smoked, added a much more robust flavor than my usual frozen Tyson grilled chicken strips. It also had some fat (read:flavor!) that a grilled chicken strip lacks.

My dad is a master at this kind of improv with any groceries (he and Jordan did a Chopped challenge where they could only spend $15 to feed four of us 3-courses at a discount store), much less leftovers. He is notorious for getting every last drop of flavor and value out of an item; one of his best examples is a chicken noodle soup made out of KFC chicken and gravy leftovers! I hope to someday have this flair and ability to improvise, but I certainly think this is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, with our remaining gallon-sized Ziploc bag of turkey, we'll be able to think outside of the box (and Mexican flavors) for some new dishes this weekend.

Happy eating and reheating!

Saturday update: I just used diced pieces of turkey leg meat to make a wonderful panang curry! Panang curry is often served in Thai restaurants; it's a coconut milk red curry with lots of vegetables and very little heat. It has traditional light and warm Thai flavors without the spice you sometimes find in curries - but I served it with a sprinkle of Thai spice and sriracha for a little oomph. I improvised this recipe- turkey, not tofu; used red curry paste instead of panang curry paste (panang is a red curry with peanuts added - you could probably recreate that, but it isn't carried pre-made in our local stores) and I didn't use Thai basil, either (another shortcoming of our grocery store). The recipe is super easy and other than the coconut milk, we normally have these ingredients on hand, so it was fairly inexpensive (we spent 16 cents on ginger and another 16 cents on snap peas!) and could be a quick dinner in a pinch. If you're looking for a sneaky, not-super-turkey-flavored way to use your leftovers (or any meat/veggie/soy leftovers), this is it!