Oh Yum!

I think most of you would know that I love to bake, cook and eat. So it should come as no surprise that I have been doing just that recently.

This weekend I tried a new bread recipe, though I can't say that I have made a lot of bread in my baking career, but this one was SO easy that I have to share. I made a delightful foccacia bread and we had that with cream of broccoli soup for supper. It was really good. Soooo tasty. The huge massive bread is... gone. Well I am bringing some of it along with the soup to our friend's who just had a baby boy. So it wasn't all Steve and I.

For this recipe I used my Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer with the dough hook which was very helpful during the kneading portion but I think it would be completely doable by hand. I used dried rosemary but I can't wait to make this in summer when I have fresh rosemary. I have also seen a very similar recipe at $5 Dinners. That one has eggplant on it too and I would love to make that sometime that recipe website was down when I went to make my bread the other day so I had to look for an alternate which happened to be the allrecipes.com one. I have high hopes for this bread. I can imagine making it with a nice pasta and salad for company. I could make it with the eggplant parm that I used to make quite often. I could make it with the eggplant stacks that I love making from Rachel Ray. That with a caesar salad out on the patio in summer. DIVINE. I better go eat something before I head to the grocery store.

Tonight for supper I made sweet and sour porkwith veggies and the Pioneer Woman's Sesame Noodles. It was sooo good. I bought some Asian Wun-Tun noodles but could have easily used a spaghetti or angel hair. I also used cilantro instead of green onions because I'm sensitive to green onions and I love cilantro.

The Sweet and Sour Pork was divine. I made it loosely based on this recipe. I used pork tenderloin because that's what I had and coated it thinly with cornstarch which really helped it brown. I also made the sweet and sour sauce that I make when I make chicken balls which was only slightly different. The one thing about this meal is that you have to serve it right away. This was my problem. It seemed like it would all take awhile but once I started going it was quickly done. I had it ready over twenty minutes before Steve walked in the door. It still tasted good 20 minutes later but things weren't as crisp as they should have been.

I didn't take any pictures of the above food because, well my camera isn't very good. I have my eye on this beauty which I am hoping to buy with my birthday money in a couple weeks. My brother Chad just got this one for Christmas and it has amazing reviews and if you've seen any of his pictures lately you know that it's working for him.

Anyways. I think now that supper is over I will go camp on the couch and hope that the dishes fairy will be along shortly.

Cheers!