Tuesday, October 25, 2011

The Family Recipe Challenge

The wonderful hostesses of my Dwight bridal shower gave us a great gift: everyone at the shower brought a favorite recipe to fill this recipe book! We turned this gift into a challenge inspired by Julie and Julia: cook all of the recipes by our first anniversary.  



Recipe #1: Grandma Wells' Italian Spaghetti Sauce from Mom Flott
While it was one of my childhood favorites, I've never actually made Grandma's sauce. It's a fairly straightforward sauce, but with a couple of unusual ingredients including cinnamon and green olives (Grandma put them in anything she could think of). The Wells' are known for their sweet-teeth (sweet-tooths?), so no Wells recipe would be complete without some sugar.  It may sound like a strange combination, but I think Cort is a convert!

And we're back!

We know there have been some complaints about the inactivity of the blog and to that we say, "we've been busy!" The good news is that we've been cooking and eating and if we can remember what all we've made then we'll write about it!

We've been tearing through the little containers of hummus and baba ganoush that they sell at the grocery store. So we decided that we could do better ourselves. The hummus was really easy - canned chickpeas, olive oil, lemon juice and some spices in the food processor.  It was good, but made a lot.

For those familiar with our differing cooking styles, (Cort is great at making up recipes and prefers guessing on measurements. Amy loves her new measuring spoons and likes to follow recipes as intended.) you can probably guess who did the seasoning of the hummus. Cort is notorious for his, um, very flavorful food. Some people, to remain nameless, will not allow Cort to season shared movie theater popcorn, among other things. The majority of the time, his bold flavors are a hit!


The baba ganoush was great and pretty easy too! We roasted a few eggplants in the oven for about an hour until the skin started to shrink. Once they were cool enough to handle, we threw them in the food processor with some tahini, olive oil, parsely, lemon juice and spices. I think the dips look great in our new serving piece from the Goldens!



We were feeling a little homesick, so we decided to bring the Chicago to Miami with some Chicago style hot dogs. We steamed the dogs, poppy-seeded the buns and broke out the lime green relish, sport peppers and special mustard that we moved 1200 miles. Apparently people here don't eat celery salt, so we had to get creative and mix celery seed and sea salt in our mortar and pestle. The result was pretty great.