Catie: What we're eating.

The Trusty Crousty

While we may be alternately poor and only somewhat poor, we've been eating really well.

So far, within our repertoire, we have the following:

Spaghetti
Chili with biscuits
Vegetable Beef Soup
Pork Stir-fry
Sloppy Joes (of questionable merit)
Fried chicken with mashed potatoes and cream gravy (very unhealthy, but I needed cream gravy...)
Chicken pesto with fresh vegetables
Oven fries (Which go with everything)

And we eat a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches, sometimes with ham or an egg.  Also, some "Eggs in a Basket", the toast with an egg fried in a hole cut in it's center, more gruesomely known as "Birdie in a Basket" by Ben, a name that freaks me out. I prefer to think of my eggs as... you know, NOT unborn chickens.

I think one of our best accomplishments thus far, however, is the baked chicken with pasta we made the other night.

I thawed two chicken breasts by heating water in our electric kettle and pouring it over them (still no microwave).
Then I rubbed them with a little olive oil and a mixture of oregano, rosemary and basil, and laid them in the weird, sort of roasting pan that came with The Trusty Crousty.  I cut a red pepper into strips, and laid them on top and around the chicken and drizzled a bit olive oil over the whole thing.  It baked at 350 F (about 175 C) for... 45 minutes or so. 

While it was baking, I poured maybe a cup and a half of Prego (Costco) into a skillet and started it simmering, then chopped:

six cherry tomatoes in quarters
two garlic cloves really finely (no garlic press)
one quarter onion (small, diced)

and threw all that into the prego to simmer.

In a second skillet, I fried two slices of bacon, really crisply, chopped them up and threw them into the sauce as well.

At HomePlus, we got some multi-colored Fusilli (spiral shaped pasta, "The name comes from fusile, archaic/dialect form of fucile, meaning rifle. As the inside barrel of a gun is "rifled" using a similar screw-shaped device" -- Wiki) and I boiled some of that.

We poured the souped up Prego over the Fusilli and put the chicken and roasted red peppers on top.  Ben made some delicious garlic bread, too.  It was quite a success and, what with our current glut of chicken breasts, we may be making something similar later on this week. We got some Tortelloni (Legend has it when gods walked the earth, an innkeeper was so enchanted with the beauty of Venus, he modeled the little Tortellini after her navel! The nickname for this pasta in Bologna is "sacred navels"!  "Tortelloni" is a larger version of Tortellini.) at Costco and I want to make something delicious with it.

Italian food is ALL the rage here, which is kind of nice, because we have an idea of what to do with the ingredients and what goes with what.

Us, all bundled up to go outside!

What I want to do is come up with things we've been able to cook in Korea, and sooking/baking substitutions that work and put all the recipes where other foreigners can access them.  There are not a lot of places to find recipes that Westerners can cook here.  And not a lot of places to tell you where to find ingredients.

But I want to do a lot of things.... psh.

Anyhow, that's what's been on our plates.  I often find myself feeling like I have nothing to post a lot of the time, but, I think since it's been FREEZING cold the past few days, and I've been doing more baking and cooking, I should be able to post about that.  We've also had a little more money and have been able to do some shopping for fun ingredients.  So, I'll try to remember to post my cooking/baking misadventures.

There's a picture of us -- today, in fact -- all bundled up to walk Ben to school.  It's chilly, but it makes it feel like the holidays are here!

- catie