Last week I blogged about the recipes I had chosen to cook this week. In an effort to cook more, and to cook new and interesting things, I'm going to be picking new recipes each week to try out.
In preparation for my kitchen adventure, I went grocery shopping on Saturday for about 2 hours. Then I immediately got to work on my chosen dishes, while The Wedding Singer played in the background.
Mini Eggplant Lasagnas
The eggplant lasagnas were pretty darn tasty - hard not to be, considering it's roasted eggplant. I definitely used too much ricotta cheese - it was my first time making any sort of lasagna and cooking with ricotta cheese at all. Also, I accidentally started following a different recipe part way through, since my cookbook grouped all the eggplant recipes together, and the page accidentally turned. I figured it out when the recipe directed me to poach an egg (hence the eggs in the photo). Overall, pretty great. I used fresh tomatoes instead of pasta sauce too, and it worked pretty well.
Crustless Roasted Red Pepper Quiche
I like the idea of this recipe, but the roasted red peppers I got had more of a kick than I realized. It was ok, though in the future I might actually go for fresh red peppers instead. Also, I think the sliced tomato on the mini quiche (instead of many tomatoes on a large quiche) adds a nice artistic touch.
Pineapple Fried Rice
Simple and easy, and quite tasty. I forgot to get some of the spices I needed, so I supplemented with whatever I could find - which was a dash of soy sauce (how appropriate). I also used brown rice instead of white rice, which I think made it even tastier (and healtheir).
Overall, I think my first week of "Adventures in the Kitchen" was a success. I'm definitely going to try to keep this up. I've got a lot of recipes marked in my cookbooks that I want to try, so hopefully that will help motivate me. Stay tuned!
To go back and get the recipes for these dishes, check out my last blog post: Adventures in the Kitchen - Week 1
