Halls of the Dark Muse

First of all to give a little bit of background, it is only fairly recently that I quite by accident and by some surprise discovered an enjoyment of cooking, the reason I say that is because generally speaking I am the least domestic person in the world but various different factors led me into actually starting to get into and enjoy cooking. For one thing I do love food and well it is also a useful skill to be able to provide food for yourself.

This evening for dinner I decided I was going to make a salad using some chicken I have which had already been cooked, so one would think that making a salad would be repetitively simple and involve little to no cooking, and yet it seems I spent most the day in the kitchen today. Not all of that being the fault of the salad.

It started with after eating lunch I decided I was in the mood for cookies, so I thought I would bake some cookies for myself, problem being with that, is that on Saturday I want to make a blueberry banana bread and we don't have very many eggs, so I didn't want to use too many of them all up, and it is kind of hard to bake cookies without eggs. Well I found a recipe for no bake cookies which sounded pretty simple and could be made without eggs obviously. No Bake cookies are basically just chocolate, peanut butter, a few other ingredients and you boil it all up than mix everything together and dollop spoonfuls on wax paper and let cool. I did run into one slight problem, the recipe called for Quick oats, and I just saw oats, and thought we have that, without paying close enough attention to what kind of oats, and we only have Old Fashioned oats, so the oats where undercooked, but it did not affect the taste, they just don't have that crispy crunch which is nice for texture. But the cookies are still good and I was happy with them.

The salad I was going to make was a Chicken BLT BBQ salad so most the ingredients where pretty basic and simple, I already had the chicken cooked, and originally for the bacon I was just going to use bacon bits, because quite frankly the thought of frying anything daunts me, I do not feel qualified to be near burning hot oil without proper supervision. So I didn't want to deal with making my own bacon, but we didn't have any bacon bits and I didn't feel like going to the store to get them so I thought the bacon really wasn't crucial to the salad I could just find something else crunch to put on top, but then bacon is awesome. I went online and found a recipe for cooking bacon in the oven, so I figured I would give that a shot, and for anyone who might be skeptical of the idea of oven cooked bacon, it really did come out very well. I overcooked mine a wee bit, but I can say it was crunchy, crispy, and tasty. So that went well and was pretty easy,

The salad also had a recipe for a salad dressing to make with it which called for BBQ, I am not generally a fan of BBQ sauce, but I noticed we had some Teriyaki sauce, and I do quite like Teriyaki sauce, so I thought maybe I could use that in place of the BBQ sauce, the idea of a Teriyaki flavored dressing sounded good, but as it turns out Teriyaki sauce cannot be used as a substitute for BBQ sauce, the dressing was quite disgusting tasting really, so I ditched that and just used some Catalina.

In addition, the other day I got the crazy idea to make my own bread, now I have never tried to make bread, bread before. I have made deserty/pastry like breads like banana breads but not just regular old bread like the type you would have with dinner. Needless to say I didn't have any so I looked up recipes for yeastless bread and found one that sounded pretty simple. Now the recipe I found called for whole wheat flour, of which I didn't have, and not having much experience in bread making I thought to myself, flour is flour, and I am not a huge fan of wheat bread anyway, so I made it with just regular flour, and I think I might have overworked the dough a bit and possibly overcooked it slightly.

It didn't turn out that great, but it wasn't horrible, I ate a couple slices with my dinner that night, which was pasta, which is why I wanted some bread because in my mind bread goes with pasta. But it was kind of bland, and not that great to have just plain with a bit of butter.

So I was trying to think of what I could do with this bread to make it a bit more interesting because on its own it wasn't that appetizing, but I couldn't justify just throwing it out. Now I am a fan of those cooking shows like Chopped, Cut Throat Kitchen etc.. where chefs are given an assortment of odd and sometimes unappetizing ingredients and have to find a way to use them to create a quality dish, and so I thought to myself, if his bread was on Chopped what would the chefs do with it?

I came up with the idea of using it to make some crostini's to go with my salad. For those who do not know a crostini is basically a slice of bread on which you put the topping of your choice and than bake in the oven, essentially the same as brochette.

I made up this mixture of olive oil, garlic herb sea salt, basil, Parmesan cheese, oregano, and pepper, and I have to say it actually turned out really good, just a tad on the salty side, I think I overdid the garlic salt a little bit, but I was surprised by how good it really was.

Also I have to say that the salad itself was really quite good and I am not usually a salad eater. Occasionally one will sound interesting and sometimes for lunch when I don't feel like making a sandwich and trying to think of something different to have (and usually for lunch I don't feel like cooking I want something pretty easy to put together) I will combine interesting random ingredients to make a salad. But I don't eat salad a lot and rarely for dinner, but I really liked this one.

But it did turn out to be one of the most complicated salads I ever made, which just reminds me, I had a watermelon in the fridge I was going to cut up to have with my salad and then kept forgetting about it, so maybe I will go do that now.