cooking...

The first part of this post is an excerpt of an email I sent my kids today:

For some reason we decided we needed to do some dutch oven cooking today. Frank originally wanted to do the whole charcoal briquettes/cooking outdoors thing but in the end (what with the weather and all. And the fact that I was like "no way!") we are just using the oven.  I bought ingredients for beef bourguignon -for some crazy reason- and I made some dutch oven bread. The bread is rising now and will go into the dutch oven in about an hour so if it turns out, I’ll send a picture!

Beef Bourguignon is sort of like a beef stew with a red wine sauce. I love a good wine sauce so I even ventured to the liquor store for the actual type of wine that the recipe called for.  I know nothing about wine, obviously, but found a bottle that had the same name listed in the recipe-- and it was even on sale! (4.99 so I’m assuming it’s not a stellar bottle of wine that I bought) ha!

Then today as I was putting the recipe together I realized that I do not own a corkscrew to open this bottle!  I was thinking that maybe Frank had some sort of multi-tool contraption that maybe would have one but even after searching the garage I couldn’t find one. He wasn't home so I just had to figure it out on my own...

I turned to google of course. There were a few options there so I tried the first one listed which was to basically stick a serrated knife into the cork and twist.  This felt like it might work at first but then it started to shred the cork, which seemed like a bad outcome. 

The second option was to push the cork into the bottle. Which, in hindsight, I should have just done first before the cork got all shredded. But I was feeling desperate so I gave it a shove with the end of a spoon. It did go into the bottle but the wine also shot up and out with a fair amount of force.  I might have drops of red wine on my kitchen ceiling now…I definitely had it on my face, arms, hands, countertop and floor.
(A day later I discovered the front of one of my cabinets covered in wine. It wasn't anywhere near where I was working so I didn't think to look there for damage. Oh boy...I might still find a few surprises I'm thinking)

Right after this happened I realized I was about to be late for a meeting at church so I quickly rinsed off and ran out the door. As I sat in the chair at church I definitely got a whiff of wine coming off of me. Hopefully no one noticed! hahaha

In any event, I got the wine out of the bottle and into my stew. I did have to pour it through some cheese cloth though since I didn’t want cork pieces in my stew. 

Cooking is always an adventure when I am involved. 

The stew has about an hour left at this point and it smells divine. Hopefully it tastes as good as it smells.

It was so tasty!

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I also made dutch oven bread. It's a no knead bread and it rises for 18-24 hours. It turned out beautiful and tastes amazing. I might have to make it all the time!

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I was out running errands and stopped at a little boutique near my house. I saw these amazing looking cookies by the checkout and found out they were chocolate chip coconut cookies! Why didn't I ever think of that combo? Anyway I bought them for a dessert surprise. But I ended up being the one surprised when they had pecans in them!  I was so sad! So Frank got to eat two cookies for dessert while I sulked.

I felt deprived for like two days afterwards until I just up and made some myself!  They are quite tasty.