Thyme for last night's dinner, and the fourth of July!

Last night's dinner was delicious. We had braised root-beer molasses pork, sweet pepper and cucumber coleslaw, and bananas foster with vanilla ice cream. My group, Eddie, Mahlon, and me, made the sweet pepper and cucumber coleslaw, we added carrots which was delicious because we all love carrots in our coleslaw and it was overall pretty good, although it could have used a bit more dressing. The pork was delicious. After dinner we needed to pack up a bunch of stuff from the kitchen for our activities for today. and after that, the bananas foster and vanilla ice cream were a delicious rewarding treat! I'm excited for today, it's the fourth of July, obviously, and no better way to spend it than cooking for 75 people! We're going to the anathoth community gardens in cedar grove where we are participating in a cooking fundraiser. We will be making pizza, salad, and blueberry crumble bars all with delicious ingredients from the garden. After all of this cooking with local ingredients that are in season, it really makes me take a look at how I cook normally, grabbing foods from the grocery store and not looking at where they're from. I'm going to make it a personal goal of mine to try to get at least some of my ingredients locally, from the farmers market, my garden or the garden my mom helps at, and etc. and I want to work up to only using ingredients that I can find around here. I might even want to start my own garden. Not that I have a place to!

thyme for a philosophical realization

I don't worry about my future much, but when I do I worry a lot. Mainly I worry that I won't have the endurance to fight through all I need to in order to gain the career that makes me most happy. But I think I realized something today. Some careers are commonly stereotyped as the hard ones. For example becoming an actor or musician that earns a solid income and can support a family. But it's really not about how hard it is to get what you want. Because anything I want to be is going to be a struggle, there will be lots of all nighters and hours and hours on end of time invested. And sometimes you'll want to give up. But it's not about being frightened of the future, it's about making sure that what you're fighting for is something that you love. Because in the long run, that's really all that matters, right?

Thyme for second day!

So I'm still trying to figure out how to upload pictures to my blog..I'm going to start writing because I have to go to bed soon and I'm not sure if I'll be able to get the pictures together in time..anyways I woke up at a wopping 7:00 this morning, it was terrible and I had no idea where I was at first so I went through that whole 'whatttt?' thing. And then went on to make a delicious breakfast which I described in the earlier post. After breakfast we all loaded into the cars. We all like to argue over which car is the 'party car' but I'm convinced the car that I'm in is always the party car. We went to Vimala's for lunch,

she is one of the most amazing, beautiful, genuine, and talented people I have ever met. We used only the most fresh, delicious, and local ingredients for our recipes. 

We helped prep the food for lunch.

She taught me so many things which I wrote down in my handy dandy notebook, she also gave us a handout with recipes, which I am so excited about.  She made us delicious food while we listened to her talk about stories about food and give us cooking tips. Here is the food:

My favorite part of the meal was the chicken. I picked up a lot of tips that I plan to use in my cooking but the two that I think stuck most were to put cardimum in my brownies when I'm creaming the butter in sugar because it gives them a fruity kick and lavender lemonade.

 mmmm. In a couple of weeks I'm visiting some friends in Portland and I've been collecting recipes to cook for them, I'm really excited, I think they're going to love the recipes I've put together. After the curryblossom cafe, we went to a homestead in Chapel Hill which was so much fun. I got to milk a goat! And play with the baby goat, patches.

And i would love to be modest here...but I can't! I got it on like the first try. I am a master. We also learned how to make goat cheese, so delicious! 

And we made lip balm which was a lot of fun.

 Learning about all this stuff on the homestead made me really want to live on the farm. I really feel most happy when I'm close to nature. For dinner we had grilled zuchinni flan, chicken and dumplins, carolina style, sweet potato biscuits, and ginger chess pie.Tonight was the first night we cooked in the C'est si bon kitchen. It was really nice. The knifes were really sharp, which I'm not used to. And the food was delicious and fresh from the garden. I have to say I thought the zuchini flan was going to be disgusting, I wasn't looking forward to it, I had my plan all layed out how I was going to pretend to eat it and secretly slip it under my plate. But I have to say it was quite a pleasant surprise. It was a lot like a mini quiche, and the prosciutto was delicious. It's definitely on my menu for Portland. The chicken and dumplin soup I didn't really like too much, yet again I'm not really that much of a soup fan except for the ones in the Julia Child cookbook that are coated in cream. The sweet potato biscuits and ginger chess pie, I was in charge of with salt boy and Victoria. The sweet potato biscuits were actually pretty yummy, but the pie just had way too much salt and it was pretty gross. Everybody thought it was okay but it was actually pretty gross. So excited for tommorow. ciao!

thyme to eat farm eggs for breakfast!

This morning we had eggs with basil, garlic, peppers, onions, potatoes, and bacon for breakfast. I was one of the chefs this morning and it was so much fun. I've always been a safe chopper, thanks to my mom, but not an efficient one I have learned. I look forward to learning how to be more efficient in all ways in terms of my cooking prep. I've been trying to cook my way through the Julia Child cookbook and usually on each of my recipes I've had to spend more time prepping the recipe than cooking it. Right now I'm a little bit discouraged from the Julia Child cookbook because I'm having a bit of a hard time on the Hollandaise sauce. Jeremy and Dorette said that they'll show me how to make a perfect hollandaise sauce tonight which I'm really excited about, because I've never actually tried hollandaise sauce and if I can master it then I'll be able to move forward in the book! I knew that it would be fun living with people that I share the same love of cooking with, but this is even better than I imagined. We discussed food over breakfast. If I could discuss culinary techniques over breakfast with my family I would be the happiest girl on the earth. At least I get 5 days of this. And in the cooking business, you have to learn to work with what you have. bye for now!

first day

Today was my first day of C'est si bon cooking camp. We didn't make our own meals, but Jeremy and Alice made it for us and dinner was delicious! For dinner we had Spicy shrimp and remoulade, smoked north carolina turkey legs in an apricot glaze, sweet potatoes with walnut and chili oil, grilled zucchini, roasted corn, july salad/honey mustard vinaigrette, and 7-up pound cake with berries and lavender glaze. It was a delicious meal and I'm looking forward to cooking more like it myself. I'm very excited for tomorrow and what's to come. I've made a few goals for myself this week for my cooking and for myself. They seem very fitting for both. I want to be more flexible and optimistic in attitude, and also when cooking. toodles!