I thought I would stop by today just to let my few readers that I have not forgotten about this blog already! I fully plan on continuing my One Bowl Adventure as soon as the Holiday season is over, I am moved into my new apartment, and have my own kitchen once again!
Hope your Christmas and Holiday was delicious.
Christi
I love artichokes. I love steamed artichokes, pickled artichoke hearts, basically anything artichoke-y. So in honor of my life-long love, I decided to choose our first recipe based on this fact about myself. Risotto with Artichoke hearts.
Now, to express to you just how incredibly uneducated I am about the cooking world, I will share with you the sad information that I had never tasted, seen or even heard of Risotto. Needless to say, shopping for it in the local HEB was interesting. But, with the help of the adolescent employee who informed me he went to a whole week of culinary school and one of the things he learned about was Risotto- we finally located it next to the pasta. It looks like rice! But, it’s pasta…? Whatever. I bought it.
The picture in the cook book is very white. White Risotto, white cheese, white, white, white. Our end product ended up brown. This is probably mostly attributed to the fact that we cheated and didn’t make our own vegetable stock, we bought two boxes of it instead. Who wants to spend time making vegetable stock? Not us. So, ours was brown and theirs was white.
Here is a shot of the boiling pot of vegetable stock, chopped onions, butter and olive oil.
Not to pleasing to the eye, eh? It sure smelled good though. I love the smell of sauteed onions and broth. Mmm mmm, good.
These are the ingredients waiting patiently for their turn to be added. We didn’t have fresh parsley and the only way I could buy it at the HEB I chose was in mass quantities. So, I quickly hushed the voice in my head saying “Just take a leaf or two! No one will ever know!” and decided to not use any. But, when I informed Jay of this, he reminded me that I had bought some dried parsley for Thanksgiving. So, we saturated some in some hot water in a tea cup and it worked just fine when added.
Don’t you love our heaping cup of freshly grated Parmesan cheese? Jay taught me how freshly grated versus already-grated-for-you Parmesan is oh-so much better. Boy, was he right.
Then the time came to add all the above ingredients to the boiling pot of brown. So, we did. The aroma of the artichokes was fabulous.
And there you have our finished project! Not quite (at all) like the picture in the cookbook, but it tasted wonderful. We discovered that the vegetable stock was pretty much sodium-free (ew) so we added a lot of salt and pepper while it was still in this pot and it was perfect. Cheesy, Risotto-y, artichoke goodness.
I didn’t want us to just get cheesed and salted up, so I decided to spring a little more cash and buy some fresh strawberries and blueberries to add color, sweetness and fruit to the equation. That was easy enough. Something I’m good at is making things that don’t have to be cooked. I just chopped off the leafy tops, washed each strawberry one by one, and mixed them in with washed blueberries.
Bon Apetite!
Next is an eggplant dish that Jay chose. Not sure when we will have time to make it as I work til almost midnight every day the rest of the week and then am spending a few days in Houston. But, when we make it, I will return with story and pictures and hopefully another successful report.
Christi
It all started with me waiting in line at the local Marshall’s store about to purchase Christmas presents for my Mother, when I looked over and I spotted it. “The Big Book of One Pot” is what it said on the cover, and yum is what it says on every page. So, I decided to be an impulse buyer and shell out the seven bucks needed to make it ours.
I brought it home and presented it to my lovely boyfriend, Jay, and we sat and read the delectable introduction written by Christine McFadden and perused the scrumptious photography by Mike Cooper, all the while eating up every recipe in the food styling of Sumi Glass and Lincoln Jefferson (what a name, eh?).
I was hooked. I choose to think Jay was too. I proposed the idea of cooking our way through the entire book and he effortlessly agreed. (We had just recently watched Julie & Julia… I admit it, I stole the idea from Julie to blog about our One Bowl Cooking Adventure.)
So, now, here we are. We have soups, meat, poultry, vegetables and desserts in our future. Yum, yum, yum, yum and yum. There is a seafood section, but Jay isn’t a fan… so maybe I’ll sneak in a few here in there for my own personal pleasure. 
We attempt our first recipe tonight. It’s up to me to decide which one we do. I’m excited! Hopefully all goes well.
-Christi
