Some of My Recent Culinary Adventures

I realize I have been a bit of a slacker on my blog posts lately, so I promise to repent. I keep meaning to post pictures of the awesome things I have been cooking lately, so this is a rather lengthy post chronicling some of my successes and one serious misadventure.

    I have always wanted to try making my own noodles, so I tried it out one day.  It was fun! 

Mixed up the dough with a fork and kneaded it into a nice little ball.

Rolled them out and cut them into nice, even noodles

Lacking a proper pasta drying rack, I improvised.

The ones on the spoons dried faster than the ones on the cooling racks.

I let them dry for a few hours and then tossed them into a pot of homemade chicken soup.  It was delicious! I tried it again a week later, but this time put the soup, including the noodles in a crockpot around lunchtime so it would be ready for dinner. By dinner time, the noodles had pretty much disintegrated.  In the future, I will add them at the last minute.  Overall, I would say my first attempt at pasta-making was a definite success.

 My next adventure was more of a misadventure.  I knew that Kelson was having a rough day at work, so I wanted to surprise him with something fun to eat for date night.  I was at the grocery store and noticed that mussels, which Kelson had said were his favorite shellfish, were on sale.  I had tried one at a restaurant the week before and liked it, so I thought I would try cooking them at home. 

We scrubbed them clean and debearded them to get ready to cook. It freaked me out to think that they were still alive, so I tried not to think about that part.  It was definitely weird to see the food I was washing move as they opened and closed.

Cooking them was actually kind of fun. We put them in a single layer in a pan and steamed them until they opened up.  It was a fun date night activity, learning something new together.

Candlelit dinner complete with matching china, salad forks, and fancy salads. I think the rice-a-roni side dish might cancel out the classiness of it all, but we liked it anyway.  We had such a lovely setup.  Things went downhill from there...

I managed to eat about 5 mussels before I started gagging from the intense fishy odor and little grains of sand that were still inside. I finally gave up and satisfied myself with side dishes for dinner. The worst of it came in the next few days.  It took forever to get the fishy smell out of our house, and every time I smelled it I felt like throwing up.  Our sink smelled like shellfish for a week. To make matters worse, we put the leftover mussels in our outside garbage, and animals kept getting into it. We forgot to take the trash out on trash day, so we had to wait another week to get rid of it. Let's just say that our adventures with mussels have convinced me that Kelson will be buying his shellfish in restaurants from now on.

My culinary adventures to be continued in another post...