Last night I made something out of one of my new cookbooks: Cook 1.0. I had to make a few modifications however, as I couldn't find any chipotle chile's in adobo sauce, so I substituted some garlic hot-sauce and some smoked tabasco sauce. Its basically a nice thick and smoky corn chowder that's topped with some puff pastry. Unfortunately I couldn't find that either, so we had 2 bowls of corn chowder last night. Still very yummy though!

I'm going to take this opportunity to unveil my recipe archive. I thought long and hard about how I wanted to organize my recipes. Right now I have a drawer full of printouts, and a diverse collection on various websites. I've decided to keep my own website of recipes that I've actually done, or at least plan on trying in the very near future. Through the power of wiki, I can also plan out my menus. I can manage my own shopping lists thank you! The nature of the wiki page is that anybody is allowed to make changes to the page, so if you would like to contribute, feel free.

A few months back I got an interesting idea from a website. I forget the exact website, but essentially somebody found a CompactFlash that had exactly one years worth of pictures on it. That is, the first and last pictures were 1 year apart. That got me thinking of an interesting idea, and one that will hopefully force me to expand my photographic abilities. For 1 year, starting today, I will take one picture every day. In actuality I might take more than one picture a day, but by the end of the day, I should whittle it down to just one. Of course, I expect that I will forget every now and then, but hopefully not too often.

My original thought was to not look back over the pictures until I was done, but I'm not sure that would be possible (given the size of CF that I'm working with). So perhaps I'll upload pictures somewhere once a week or so for all to enjoy.

I'm hoping that not only will this provide to be an interesting project for its own sake, but will force me to think about taking pictures, and will also get Laura and myself out of the house more often, and do some touristy things in our own city.

I had a great Christmas this year. Laura's mother and brother were staying with us, stretching the available sleeping room to the breaking point! Luckily, my parents pitched in with an air mattress which worked out really well. On Christmas Eve, I made my first ever angel food cake. Laura's family has the tradition of making a 'Christmas cake' which is a green angel food cake with red frosting. We were using liquid food coloring (instead of powdered) so it was more a light green and pink cake. It came out wonderfully though, and tasted fantastic. I'll be making another one for Laura's birthday I'm sure.

This year was the year of the kitchen. I received all sorts of kitchen stuff and some really nice cookbooks including Cook 1.0 and Baking Illustrated. I can't wait to try out some new ideas in the kitchen. I still have a few more necessities to buy including a rolling pin, a food processor, and a digital scale. Hopefully Laura will continue indulging me as long as I keep pumping out some tasty food for her!

I keep finding all sorts of really interesting recipes that aren't the sort of thing that I would necessarily make for dinner. Somebody needs to throw a little dinner party so that I can experiment with some new and exciting recipes. Anybody? Its the holidays! Come on! Anybody? Bueller?

Thanks to the Beauchamps for stepping up and throwing an awesome dinner party. That was some of the best food I've had in a long time! I can't wait to get my grubby little hands on that pasta recipe. I thought my contributions came out really well. I was very happy with the salad, and the potatoes were nice and creamy, and had that unique tang of goat-cheesiness.

I think we'll end up doing something like this next month for Laura's birthday. I can only hope it'll be just as good!

Laura had an Ornament Swap with her alumnae chapter on Sunday. She enlisted my help with the food preparations. I loved having the chance to try out some new techniques and recipes without having to eat all of the results. So I hard boiled 18 eggs on Saturday (10 minutes in the steamer basket), split them open and made 36 deviled eggs. Most of the yolks came out quite easily, and in fact none of them were green! I mixed them in with some finely minced onion, minced celery, celery salt, salt, and paprika (of course). Filling them was a little challenging, Someday when I have a set of pastry tips, I might opt to use them instead.

I also made a baked brie dish with caramelized onions, pistacios and dried cranberries. It probably needed another 5 minutes in the oven to really get the brie good and gooey. I didn't have any of this, but the onion mixture smelled wonderful.

Updated 8 Dec 2004: Ever wonder what to do with a huge plate of left-over deviled eggs? Well, besides eat them. Just mix them with a little extra mayo, and mash them with a fork (or pastry blender). I added a dash of cayenne pepper and had some very yummy egg salad sandwiches. Usually I don't go through the trouble of finely mincing onion and celery for egg salad, so there was a pleasant texture to these sandwiches.