Veteran's Day

Happy Monday!  I know, I know, nobody likes Mondays.  Well, with today being Veteran's Day, I won't be cooking.  My husband is an Army Vet so he likes to go out and get his free meal.  That means tonight is like a date night!  We decided to go to Olive Garden which is one of my favorite restaurants.  I get to eat great Italian dishes that I've yet to learn how to cook.  And finish it off with a slice of tiramisu my all time favorite dessert!  My husband called ahead, so we wouldn't have to wait for a table because restaurants get very busy when they offer free meals.  The waiter came and took our drink orders.  My husband chose a blackberry blood orange tea and I opted for water because I knew I'd like a special coffee with my dessert.  Once they picked the tea leaves from China and the waiter brought it to him, he was parched!  But it was worth the wait.  His tea was to die for I tell ya!  Throw a little vodka in that and you've got yourself a cocktail!  It was so delicious and full of flavor!  I'm sorry I didn't order one myself.  We decided to try a new appetizer.  I'm partial to their fried calimari and stuffed mushrooms, but Brian wants nothing to do with those items.  We settled on a flatbread something or another topped with beautiful red tomatoes, roasted red peppers, and fresh basil.  Is there anything they serve that doesn't make me feel like I'm in Italy?  For our entrees, I ordered the same thing I do 90% of the time:  the ravioli di portabello, which is my favorite item from their menu.  Hubby ordered from a "special" veteran's menu and got the sausage and peppers with macaroni.  He liked it alot, but it was just okay to me.  I much more prefer the rich, smokey flavor of the mushroom ravioli in that divine cream sauce!  We both saved room (or so we thought) for dessert.  We both ordered the tiramisu and I ordered a cafe latte.  I like the way the bitterness offsets the sweet of the tiramisu.  As with his tea, I thought they had to go pick the coffee beans for my coffee.  By the time the waiter decided to tell us that their machine was down, I was already two-thirds through my dessert and quite perturbed. 

After our meal, we decided to go to Bed Bath & Beyond to walk off a couple of courses.  They have a nice roasting pan with a rack, that I've had my eye on for a few weeks.  I'm tired of aluminum pans at Thanksgiving.  Especially since we cook two every year.  One for at Brian's grandma's house and one for church potluck the Sunday before Thanksgiving.  So we got the pan and we also got a set of lifting forks.  And because he is a veteran, we also got a 20% discount!  How great is that!  I'm seriously looking forward to using that pan next week because I have a Barefoot Contessa roast chicken recipe I want to try. 

So, I'll be back in the kitchen tomorrow and I can't wait!  It's the recipe I've been dying to cook since I bought 2 cans of rather pricey tomatoes at the grocery store last week.

See Ya in the Kitchen!

My First Disaster

Let's start with my very first kitchen disaster, because after all, we've all had them!  It didn't happen in my kitchen though.  Unfortunately it happened at my very first job.  Back in about 1993 I was around 17 years old and had just started working at The Hungry Pelican, a fast food spot in our local Galleria.  I had only been working as a cashier on the front line for a few days.  We kept a cauldron, similar to the one in the picture above, out in the front so that we cashiers could ladle a hot bowlful as needed.  There was a window between us and the kitchen where the orders came through, and one of the cooks passed a stainless steel pot filled with steaming clam chowder through the window and told me to put it in the pot.  So, I poured the chowder into the pot and passed the now empty stainless steel pot back through the window to the cooks.  They looked extremely puzzled and asked me did we already need more chowder.  I told them no, I just put that chowder that they gave me into the pot like they told me to.  They looked at me like I had just ruined their entire day.  I didn't understand, I just did what they told me to do.  Then my manager came to the window.  She asked me what happened.  I told her that I put the clam chowder in the pot just like the cook asked me to.  It was then that she informed me that the stainless steel pot should have been SET DOWN INTO the pot.  LMAO!!  I didn't realize that the pot was itself just a prop that acted as a warmer that had to be plugged in.  i thought it was a real iron cauldron that you could actually cook in!  Needless to say, I created quite a mess that day and my family still teases me about it to this day over 20 years later.  Thankfully, that's one mistake that I will never make again.  There are many more mistakes and stories to be told however and I will definitely be sharing more disaster stories as well as triumphs very soon!  In the meantime, it's back to the kitchen for me.  I hope you'll share with me some of your kitchen disasters!

See ya in the Kitchen!