Stirrings in the kitchen

...That's a pun, isn't it.

Anyway, that IS the other thing I've mostly been up to this summer: cooking. I'm cooking pretty regularly, and learning what the appropriate amount of food is to cook for two people. I've discovered how to cook steak, I've been making omelets every weekend, and I made a cheesecake this past weekend (and egg salad during the week); otherwise it's been a lot of standards: risotto (bacon spinach, beet), Thai curries and salads (green curry with chicken and zucchini, red curry with beef and butternut squash, pork salad, tuna salad); guacamole; pizza (bacon and spinach with ricotta). Tonight we had round eye steak with spinach and arugula salad with homemade yogurt-vinaigrette.

Another new dish I tried recently was quiche.

Italian sausage with mozzarella, roma tomatoes, and oregano; I found the recipe on Epicurious and used some the suggestions offered by reviewers; it turned out quite well (Andrew ate half of it that night).

I admit that it's a frozen crust, but I've never made a pie crust before.

I have been doing some baking, though. First it was chocolate chip blondies that were deliciously cake-like. Next it was these:

I just used the traditional Toll House recipe, but I took some advice from an article in the New York Times and chilled the dough for a day before baking. The result was evenly-browned, very consistent, rich cookies. The trick was making the batter late enough at night that I didn't feel like baking and eating them right then.

At the beginning of the summer I purchased a basil plant. Apparently they are considered good luck in Mexico, and I wanted to try my hand and growing something.

Unfortunately, that's the prettiest it's looked since we used all the large leaves in Andrew's pasta sauce; the porch here doesn't get enough direct sunlight for the leaves to really grow. It's still healthy, though, just not very useful right now.

Aaaand that's enough for now, I think. Andrew's constructing a new blog and it's gotten me motivated to pay a little more attention to this one. We'll see how long this competitive burst of energy lasts. Drabble sometime later tonight.