back from the store

last night i came back from the store with a bunch of stuff. there was a good balance of real food and desert/junk food there.

meats

• chicken thighs
• beef sirloin
• ground beef
• chorizo <#
• sliced turkey
• pepperoni
• salami
• nathan's hot dogs <#

vegetables

• red onion
• regular boring onion
• parsley
• romaine hearts
• peas <#
• garlic
• lemon
• tomatoes
• canned beans
• canned crushed tomatoes
• mushrooms

fruits

• strawberries
• clementines
• splenda raspberry jam (which i broke before we reached home)

drinks

• orange juice
• mango smoothie
• reduced fat milk
• diet sodas with splenda (that's all amanda)

carbs

• orzo
• tortilla
• wheat sliced bread
• buttermilk white sliced bread
• mac n cheese

misc

• slow churn cookies and cream ice cream
• mango sorbet
• sliced cheese
• cookies
• sour cream

that was most of it. theres a good distribution of stuff in there. i know i'm going to have to come back for vegetables anyway, so i'm not going to get too much of that stuff. from jamie oliver's site which i linked to last time, i decided to make his wild mushroom venison stroganoff. since i didnt have access to a whole foods, i had to change some stuff in the recipe. one thing i would like to note here is that people should not be too afraid of changing a recipe if the ingredients you're switching out is fairly compatible. for example, i couldnt get venison so instead i got beef. it asked for rice, but since amanda and i really like orzo, we decided to go with that instead. i took jamie's advice on using the sour cream instead of the other french thing.

though i dont recommend you do this at first, this is what i do with recipes. i read through it and get a feel of what tastes the dish is trying to create, and then i modify it to my liking. besides, once you get the feel for something, you dont really need to follow it step by step. you just kinda... know what to do. in my opinion, cooking is a creative art. recipes are ill-equipped  to transfer type of intrinsic knowledge between people. i read through it and basically got that you were suppose to cook the meat, the vegetables, and everything else except the creme to get all the flavors together. then, you add the cream at the very end and put it over the rice. dont get me wrong, there are a lot of things you make that will require a particular technique which you cant wing. for the purposes of most of the things i make, it'll be fine. learn to use your eyes for quantity and you'll never have to bother with measuring things again. note: this does not apply to baking. you must measure out everything or else things can turn funky.

in the next post, i'm going to post the video of what i actually did. there will be some tidbits in there about how to cut things easily and what is the proper order of cooking things to get the most flavor out of your ingredients. sorry i cant post it sooner, but i need to edit it first because there were parts that were quite boring (me cutting beef for 5 mins).