Culinarily speaking... there are my dreams and then there's my reality

I am always discovering new recipes in vintage cookbooks, pamphlets, magazines, books and, now, on Pinterest. The thought of making culinary delights thrills something deep inside me and makes my heart skip a beat. I just got a new copy of Frances Mayes latest book The Tuscan Sun Cookbook: Recipes from Our Italian Kitchen and it seems that every page I read makes that flutter inside my chest happen.  It all sounds so wonderful... the process of making something with my own hands and then giving it to loved ones to enjoy and savor as we chat, laugh, and create memories while sitting around a big table laden with the dishes that once held my culinary creations.

There's just one problem... I don't cook.

I've resorted to creating a board on Pinterest called "Want to Try It (Food)" (which is really code for "Honey, can you make this?").

Hubby is a culinary genius in the kitchen. Early in life he aspired to being a chef and has the skills to be one of the best of the best. But he also dreamed of having a wife and family and made a conscious decision that being a chef would require hours away from that dreamed-of wife and family that he wanted more than he wanted the dream of being a chef. So he became a technology guru instead, and I (the wife that finally came along) now get to enjoy all his chef-i-ness for myself.

I'm spoiled. I'll admit it. I rarely have to cook dinner. And most of the time Hubby even plates my dinner like I've ordered it at a restaurant. His talent for creating a beautiful plate of food is amazing. I always want to photograph his plate after we've gone through the line at our favorite salad bar restaurant, because it's so beautifully arranged and colorful.

I guess we have a sort of partnership (at least I like to think we do). Like a bloodhound, I go out and find the recipes to inspire him, and then Hubby makes the recipe come to life in a mouth-watering way I cannot begin to achieve.

I've tried. I really have. I love Olive Garden's chicken fettucini alfredo. I found the official recipe for their alfredo sauce online through Pinterest. I decided I was going to make it. Hubby was skeptical (cream sauces are daunting). I charged ahead with a full head of steam and all the ingredients laid out on the countertop. How hard could it be? As long as I have the recipe, I'm golden, right?

Wrong.

The resulting dish didn't taste like Olive Garden's creamy divinity that I love. It tasted like eggs.

I gave up after that.

This last week, Hubby kindly made a bacon and cheese quiche recipe I had pinned on my Pinterest board. Well, actually he used the Pinterest recipe as the base for a recipe that he made up on the fly that would be more healthy for me to eat. In the end, it was beyond fantastic! I had never tasted anything better... until a couple of days later when he remade it with a couple more tweaks (the addition of swiss cheese and green onions). Holy cow, it was even better than the first one!

Oh yeah... I am SO spoiled!

P.S. If you want to read the first tweaked version 

of the bacon and cheese quiche Hubby made click here.

A mongo-sized Vidalia onion Fed-Ex'ed all the way from Georgia

Hubby has business colleagues that are located in Georgia, and while chatting with one recently he mentioned that we get Vidalia onions all the way out here on the West Coast in California. He then added the caveat that they're the best and sweetest onions we can buy. His colleague was surprised that Georgia's produce makes it all the way out here.

A few days later, an unexpected FedEx box came to Hubby's office addressed to him with a return address from Georgia. Inside the box Hubby found a beautiful assortment of Vidalia's--one being the biggest onion he has ever seen. He was giddy with laughter when he called me mid-day to tell me about his surprise package. Only a true foodie would do that.

When he came home later that day, I found he wasn't exaggerating about the size of the onion. He doesn't exaggerate so I expected it to be big, but not that big. We put it up next to the largest onion we had from our recent trip to buy produce and it dwarfed it (see photo above).

Then I put it next to a head of elephant garlic and the Vidalia's size was even more pronounced (see photo above). It was so striking the Vidalia deserved it's own photo shoot (hence the photos in this post).


Now like every onion in our kitchen, it sits in the onion bowl waiting to be cooked up into something super yummy in the hands of my skillful and talented Hubby. He's thinking it'll become homemade onion rings. I'm thinking it might become a lovely pile of aromatic caramelized goodness to be served with chicken or beef. Regardless, I know it will be yummy and live up to the reputation the Vidalia onion has in this household.

Rosehaven Cottage's Winter Garden Is In!

The winter garden is in and doing quite nicely after a few days of chilly nights and no late autumn rainfall. We are looking forward to buttercrunch and romaine lettuce (see above photo), celery (see above photo), red Stockton onions, chives, Italian and curly parsley, spinach, two varieties of broccoli, and snow peas that have already started to adorn our salads with their sweet green pods of "yummy". There are little munch marks on the edges of many of the leaves, which is to be expected (don't know if it's birds or critter mouths that have munched on the greens). That's okay. There's enough for everyone in our backyard wildlife habitat. We plan for that eventuality in the garden and everything always works out fine. We always have enough to harvest and the critters also munch on the bad bugs and pests that we don't want around our garden so I don't have to use pesticides on my produce gardens (haven't had to for about 5 years now).

The sunflowers that were in their golden glory back in late summer are now stalwart stalks of goodness for the birds that will winter-over here. Like natural bird feeders, their abundant heads feed the oak titmouses, finches, and other seed loving birds. Their acrobatics get extremely creative on the down-facing sunflower heads. It's quite entertaining to watch them extracting a seed at a time, flitting to a nearby perch, cracking open one seed to get the delectable center from within, and then start the process all over again. Such tenacity has to be admired!

Our dwarf mandarin tree gave us quite a bounty this year, as I was able to fill up my harvest basket with wonderful orange gems of sweetness just a couple of days ago. Now the mandarins are inside in our counter top citrus bowl, and we eat one or two as a little snack in the chilly evenings as we warm ourselves by the fire. After peeling one, the smell of fresh picked citrus on my fingers is just heavenly. It's a heady fragrance that reminds me of Christmas mornings when I always had an orange in the toe of my stocking. The mandarin oil is such a pick-me-up, I almost wish I had a perfume made from it.

Our lemon trees are loaded with lemons that still have a while to go before I can harvest them into my harvest basket. I'm excited for the lemon harvest (I always am). There's so much that Hubby uses the fresh lemons for in the kitchen. He makes wonderful lemon chicken pan sauteed in olive oil. It is so simple and so mouthwatering. I always enjoy being able to provide fresh produce from our garden for him to make his culinary creations. And this year we have a new addition to his gourmet arsenal in the form of seasoned olive oil from Corning, California. We bought an assortment as we passed through a couple of weeks ago coming home from Lassen, and it's been a real treat as Hubby has used the various flavors in his cooking and his homemade vinaigrette on salads. Yum!

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