Craig Cooks Chicken

This week's menu was Broiled Chicken and Baked Potatoes.
I'm trying to start him off easy and then I'll throw the hard stuff at him. Of course if I want it to be easy I should probably read the recipes first, not just the titles.

Apparently broiled chicken involved things like herb pastes and butchering a whole chicken. Whoops!


I did learn how to do this in high school "foods" class. My vegan teacher showed us how to break the chicken's back, and that's all I really remember.


Work was horrible on Friday (I blame Andy Samberg and Lauren Conrad personally) so unless you see Craig's hands in the picture it's a pretty good bet that they were taken by him.

Ladies and gentlemen the final meal:


Loved the lemony flavour of the chicken!

Also a big thank you to Amanda Laird - after this post, I woke up to an amazing breakfast, courtesy of my newly cooking husband:

Lemon Loaf

I love lemon loaf, but for some reason I've never made it. I used to eat it at my grandparent's house where my Papa would chastise me for dipping it in tea.

This recipe was ridiculously easy.


The zest of 3 large lemons seems like a lot of zest, but it made the loaf just lemony enough. I think this is a good time to share The Kitchn's article on what to do with naked lemons.

I bought the eggs at Culinarium. I like getting eggs there because they don't all look the same, and because I have to check and make sure I'm getting chicken eggs.


Mmmm, sugar and eggs - the basis of any good recipe


Then I just mixed a couple of things and next thing I knew I was done. I always forget how liquidy these types of recipes are. If it weren't for my previous banana bread experience I would have thought I'd done something wrong at this point:

Once again I had to cook it for the maximum amount of time suggested. I don't know why I even bother checking at the minimum time.


Craig and I both liked the crunchy top crust.


I ate this with a cup of Earl Grey, but I didn't dip.

And just like that....

My husband cooked dinner for me!

He started by setting the broiler to roast the red peppers himself - something I've never done myself.

Then come the chopping. Well, dicing really. We consulted the book for proper techniques. It was largely a success with only one minor injury.




Somehow he managed to get the timing together perfectly so that our sandwiches were coming out of the oven just as the soup was done. Something I've yet to master. Considering Craig's previous dinner-making experience was mostly boiling water or dialing for delivery this totally impressed me.





Have I mentioned how much I love goat cheese? If Craig had not been available for our wedding ceremony, I would have married goat cheese instead.




Overall verdict? YUM. No "O", but only because I want to stab Rachel Ray in the eye whenever she speaks, so I refuse to use her slang.

Craig Learns to Cook

I skipped out on the Boca Whatever assignment last week. After the brownies I didn't think I could handle all that chocolate, and from the sounds of everyone else I was probably right.

There's a new feature of this blog. Craig's going to learn how to cook! And I'm likely going to learn a thing or two along the way as well. We've gone out and bought Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything" and Craig's going to make one meal from it a week. I'm going to blog his progress here. How excited is he about our project? This excited:


For the time being I'm going to pick the menu for the week.

This week's recipes will be:
Tomato Soup (page 130)
Warm Goat Cheese Sandwich (page 171)

Best Ever Brownie

Sorry I've been AWOL, off gettin' hitched and honeymooning:


And while we're on the topic, can we please take a look at this amazing cake Tina made us:

Okay, now on to these brownies. The hell, Julia? Ya trying to make me gain 20 pounds? These are actually the Best Ever Brownies. There will be no lawsuits over this recipe title. I just tried to keep these images in mind while eating them:




And I'm proud to say that I made these with the help of my very own, brand new, KitchenAid mixer.



It really wasn't much required for this recipe, but dammit I used it anyway. This was not a complicated recipe by any means, but I guess the way it was put together was unusual for a brownie? I really don't know why, since I don't get what makes a cake a cake, or a muffin a muffin.



This recipe called for an 9 inch pan and I only had an 8 inch one. So I cooked it for the longest amount of time prescribed. Still - after 28 minutes the middle still looked like soup. Now Julia says that this should be barely set, but this was only set on the edges. So I cooked for 8 minutes more. Now it was ooey, gooey awesomeness.



Also, because I'm a wife now, I was simultaneously baking bread in my new bread machine. Naked. In Heels. Except for those last two things, I'm totally telling the truth: