Roast Loin of Pork with Fennel

I made this for supper last night and the house smelled so good while it was roasting. I really like fennel when it’s been roasted – the anise flavour mellows.  Honestly, I love anything that’s been roasted…it’s so darn good. This recipe has fennel, potatoes, carrots and onions. The pork is slathered in Dijon, thyme leaves, garlic and salt & pepper then popped into the oven with the veggies.

This recipe can be found here from the Barefoot Contessa Parties cookbook.

Delicious and super easy – the hard part is waiting for it to cook and waiting for the meat to rest. Torture! 🙂

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Chocolate Chunk Blondies

Baked goods for breakfast are OK, right, because they have eggs in them? 🙂

This recipe is from the Barefoot Contessa “Foolproof” cookbook and can be found here.

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Easy Provençal Lamb

I made this for dinner – it being close to Easter and all. 🙂

It turned out quite good, the veggies were very flavourful and the honey added a caramelization to both the lamb and the veggies. Tasty!

Before:

I almost didn’t get an AFTER shot since we had already started digging in! Forgive the messy plate. 🙂

The recipe is from the Barefoot Contessa “How Easy is That” cookbook and can be found here.

Bon appetit peeps!

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Old-Fashioned Apple Crisp

I made this today and we had some for dessert after lunch with coffee. Delicious. The whole house smelled like apples and cinnamon while it was baking. 🙂

The Barefoot Contessa recipe is here.

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Potato Basil Frittata

I needed to use the eggs I had in the fridge and looked for a recipe that would need a lot of them and found this. I made this for lunch today and it was delicious! The potatoes and basil were awesome and the Gruyère cheese gave it some zing. With a simple side salad lightly drizzled with lemon infused olive oil and some pepper, it was a perfect light lunch.

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Cooking Update!

Although I haven’t posted much about my cooking updates, I have still been working my way through the Barefoot Contessa recipes and with this morning’s “Sunday Morning Oatmeal”, I’m now at 243 recipes completed out of 607. That’s 40% done! Pretty awesome. Ina also has a new cookbook coming out in October so I’m looking forward to that as well, just in time for my birthday.

My goal this year is to cook 40 recipes. The recipes I’ve completed so far in 2014 are found on my Cooking Goals 2014 page but I’ve listed them below as of this morning:

1. Butternut squash and apple soup (Jan 1)

2. Warm mushroom salad (Jan 4)

3. Perfect roast chicken (Jan 5)

4. French string bean salad (Jan 6)

5. Viennese Iced Coffee (Jan 10)

6. Spinach pie (Jan 11)

7. Jeffrey’s roast chicken (Jan 11)

8. Lemon yogurt cake (Jan 19)

9. Lasagna with turkey sausage (Jan 19)

10. Curried couscous (Jan 22)

11. Virginia Baked Ham (Jan 26)

12. Sautéed carrots (Jan 26)

13. Sunday Morning Oatmeal (Mar 2)

I’m also planning on making 2 more this weekend for lunch (Tagliarelle with White Truffle Butter) and dinner (Chicken Piccata).

We made a pit stop at the liquor store to replenish our wine fridge. This time we went European and picked up wines from Spain, France and Italy. Life is good. 🙂

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Cinnamon Baked Doughnuts

We had our first snow today and that called for baked goods in the form of cinnamon baked doughnuts. 🙂

This recipe is from the Barefoot Contessa Foolproof cookbook – they’re actually quite light, not too sweet and amazing with coffee. 🙂

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Balsamic Roasted Beet Salad

I made this for lunch today – it’s from the Barefoot Contessa Foolproof cookbook. We’ve been eating a lot of not-so-healthy stuff over the holidays and I was in need of a good cleansing dish. I had organic lettuce and beets as well as leftover goat cheese in the fridge so chose this recipe. I chose to roast the beets (tossed in some of the dressing) which allowed them to caramelize a bit. The flavours of this salad worked really great together – I’ll definitely make this again.

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Life List – 2012 in Review

When I first sat down to compile this post, I thought my list would be shorter than past years. I’ve been in a bit of a quiet period in terms of tackling life list items, however, I was quite surprised by how many items I was able to cross off! 🙂

• Cruise to Alaska (May 2012) where we visited Alaska, the Yukon and British Columbia, all life list destinations. I got to see the Rocky Mountains and increase my cruise count to 7 out of a goal of 10. We also increased the number of cruise lines we’ve sailed with to 3 out of a goal of 4.
• Cruise to Caribbean (October 2012) where we did a helmet dive (awesome!), stayed in a suite (woohoo!) and increased my cruise count to 8 out of 10. I also read in a hammock in the Bahamas. After being caught in the tail end of Hurricane Sandy on the way back and a delayed docking, we ended up flying first class home (we had to change our flight to the following day and flights were scarce, let alone economy seats).
• I completed 10 random acts of kindness – very happy about those.
• I made my own bread.
• I made Black Forest Cake.
• I made 4 colouring books (for my nieces and nephew).
• We participated in the walk to end breast cancer in September 2012. We’ll be doing this again in 2013 and hopefully will have graduated from a walk to a run. 🙂
• Read 30 books this year– Would you believe I’m at 45? My Kindle has really made reading more practical and enjoyable.
• See 50 movies this year – Just watched #50 and #51 in the past week (“Rise of the Guardians” and “The Dark Knight Rises”).
• Participate in a Flash Mob – this was for a work event and it was loads of fun. We danced to Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean.
• Cooking Challenge: As I write this, and including her latest cookbook, I’ve completed 216 of 695 Barefoot Contessa recipes – that’s 31%.

Not too shabby indeed and I still have a week to go! I’ve already started planning 2013 and what I’ll be able to tackle next year. Stay tuned!

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Roasted Asparagus with Prosciutto

The pic isn’t the best but I promise the dish was tasty. 🙂 This is from the Barefoot Contessa Foolproof cookbook. Would you believe it was the first time I made fried eggs? Also the first time I made a Hollandaise sauce. All turned out great!  This was a light et surprisingly filling meal. Definitely will make again.

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