Fancy French Toast

I've always loved french toast. I'm not sure why but it is a supreme comfort food for me. Plus so easy to make - I just use 1 cup of milk, one egg, a few spoons of sugar and a bit of vanilla. In fact, in 6th grade we had to make a speech, on anything, and mine was how to make french toast. It was a hit. So anyway, I've been experimenting a little with other variations. None so far have beat Mom's delicious combo of cream cheese and brown sugar spread on them but they have all been good.

Here's one with blackberries (my second fav fruit after strawberries) and cream.

And this one, while it looks pretty normal, is actually quite weird. Ruchir makes these purees, usually of banana, that he mixes with milk to make an odd (to me) drink. Anyway, he had a banana and blueberry puree in the fridge that looked like it was starting to lose it's appeal. So i dumped it in with the leftover french toast mixture, stirred it up, dunked my bread, and cooked it like normal french toast. If you look closely, you might notice that its a little darker than normal and that's from the blueberries. Cover in syrup and add some pecans on top. It actually didn't taste too different from normal french toast, but it did have that certain something to it that couldn't be placed.

I'm going to keep thinking for other variations, but you know what, plain old french toast is usually good enough for me!

Cinzetti's!

Now time for a break from my cooking to discuss one of the best restaurants that I have ever been to in my life! The place is called Cinzetti's and it's in Overland Park, KS. (Basically a KC suburb). It's a buffet style restaurant but don't let that fool you. Everything on the buffet is fancy actual entrees that you would easily order separately from a fancy restaurant. Examples, chicken marsala, veal parmesean, baked tilapia, an array of gourmet pizzas, lasagna, seafood pasta, etc etc.

And then the desserts, oh the desserts! Tons of ice creams, cannolis, fruit tarts, bread pudding, molten chocolate cakes.....

All for the insane price of $9.99! Seriously, the best place ever!

Oh yeah Mussels

It's no secret that I love mussels! Any way, any type, yum yum yum! Bistro du Coin in DC serves up some deelicious mussels! We recently went to a restaurant where I had mussels as the appetizer and I expressed how I wish I knew how to make mussels so that I could have them all the time! Well, lo and behold, the next day Ruchir came home with a bag of live mussels from the seafood market. This was all his masterpiece.

White wine, garlic, lemon, parsley, maybe a little onion too? It cooked quickly and before long we were feasting!

And the bowl of finished shells, just looking at this makes me want to make some again!

Crawfish Etoufee

Here's what we made with the leftover crawfish tails from our Annual Crawfish Boil. This was mostly Ruchir's doing, but I helped quite a bit too. First he made a roux, and that's where I had to step in. It was mostly flour - and it became a dough. I managed to salvage it though sort of. I can't quite remember the rest of the ingredients exactly, but it definitely had a can of diced tomatoes, two cans of tomato sauce, green peppers, onions, and plenty of cajun spice mix and cayenne pepper. Wayyyy too much cayenne pepper. Seriously this thing is hot! then we added the tails that we had extracted from the crawfish and let it all simmer. Pictures speak better than words.

Yum!

1st Anniversary Cook Off!

This was actually done quite awhile ago (June 13th, 2010 to be exact) but I'm only just now getting around to posting it.  Basically we had an Iron Chef style cooking competition to honor our 1 year wedding anniversary.  (We also went to an insanely delicious fancy restaurant but I didn't take any pictures of that meal). Ruchir wants to make this a tradition, eventually involving our children to be sous chefs.

So first things first; what to use as the "secret" ingredient?  Well that comes back from when we went to the Horseradish Festival in Collinsville, IL.  (It was a spontaneous decision on a Sunday afternoon!).  Have you ever seen a whole horseradish root? Neither had I!

Ok so now that he had these two hulking roots (they look like a femur), we had to use them up.  The rules were simple, 1 hour, make as many dishes as you want, but they all have to feature horseradish.  The judging categories were taste - 10 points, plating - 5 points, and originality - 5 points.  We were originally just going to judge ourselves but then deciding to invite a few friends over for the judging since their softball game had been cancelled.

I didn't take any close up pictures of the individual foods, too much chaos I guess.  Seriously one hour is way shorter than you'd think! But I'll give the run down.  Ruchir made a sandwich, featuring beef, sauteed onions, mushrooms, and horseradish sauce topped with a fried horseradish chip.  He also made a drink(!) with orange juice, vodka, rum, and horseradish.  I made a sandwich with beef, deep fried onions, shredded cheese and horseradish sauce.  I also made a salad with romaine, bacon, pecans, and horseradish.  I also had a soup of chicken stock, horseradish, ginger, and green onions. And then finally I had potatoes three ways: mashed with horseradish, french fries with horseradish ketchup, and baked with horseradish sauce, bacon, cheese, and green onions.

The scoring was intense - and who came out victorious??  Me of course!  I won in every category except I think we tied on plating.  I think Ruchir's food tasted great but I edged out in taste and there was no catching me on originality!  (Although inexplicably, Ruchir ranked himself higher than me in that category thinking that a weird drink was more original than three other dishes combined - cheater?:) Anyway, I got an awesome trophy and we were all happy in the end!

We'll see what happens next year!