Cooking Adventure, with Pictures

I am sitting and calmly drinking coffee for now.  Earlier I was frantically cleaning the downstairs of the house, mostly the living room and the kitchen.  “Frantically” is the way I do most things these days.  Frantically, and with frustration.

I uploaded all of the recent photos from my camera and remembered that I had wanted to detail my Whole Foods cooking experience.  I tried some vegetarian recipes, one artichoke and garlic soup, and another barley salad with Greek olives.  It was an interesting experience, and it required two types of vinegar that I had never had the opportunity to use before.  Lots of sautéed garlic made the house smell strongly, a pleasant smell to me but unfortunately an unpleasant smell for my husband.

The first task was to venture out to the grocery stores in the morning.  It was fun to find all of the unique ingredients.  Whole Foods offers a great deal on cans of artichokes in water.  Overall, finding so many ingredients at once was fairly expensive.  And since I do not cook very frequently, it was difficult to justify the fun of cooking for one day.  In any case though, it was a cooking adventure.

Once I returned with all of the ingredients, the kitchen smelled wonderful as I got started.  I started the barley first because it took about two hours.  Barley simmering on the stove with sage leaves is a great aroma.  Combine that with the smell of sautéing garlic, and that is one warm and delightful kitchen to be presiding over.

The soup turned out surprisingly well, although it made my breath horrible for almost 24 hours, much to my chagrin once my husband got back home.  The barley salad was too tart to enjoy too much.  I would want to try a sweeter barley salad with raisins.  I had to substitute almond slivers for pine nuts since that was during the pine nut scare and they couldn’t be found.

I would have a cooking adventure again.  But this time I would think very carefully about all of the steps of the recipe and all of the flavors of the finished food.