Cooking with Chef Carlson

It has been somewhat of a challenge (in my opinion) to add variety to our diet. While we are still learning what can be found in the grocery store there are still things, like chocolate chips, that I can´t seem to find. Chocolate chips can easily be substituted for a chopped up chocolate bar. However, things like cottage cheese, sour cream, pasta sauce and Crisco there are no good substitutes. Ben will tell you I am a casserole and crock pot kind of girl. Those are the kinds of meals I cooked back in the states. However, I cannot find cottage cheese, lasagna noodles or pasta sauce to save my life. So in the meantime, Ben has become the chef. Which to be honest I don´t mind. He is a great cook and while I don´t always agree with his methods, for example not measuring ingredients, not following the direction and putting copious amounts of garlic in many of the things he makes, the meals always turn out wonderful!

Like I said though it took awhile for us to have some variety in our diet. We spent maybe the first month eating pasta, fish and salad and then Ben found some yummy seasoned pork loin at the mercado so we introduced that into our diet. When the colder months came we started making soups and by this point I was tired of fish so we were eating pasta with chopped veggies and olive oil, pork loin and soup. Then, we discovered that you can order fresh ground beef at the mercado so Ben made meat balls. Shortly after that we discovered our oven actually has a rotissoire. All these months we have been pushing a button on our oven that makes a buzzing noise and we thought it was a fan to make it into a convection oven. Then one day as Ben is checking on something he is cooking he sees something turning in the back and we realize that that funny metal stick we pulled out of the oven when we first moved in is the spear to put the meat on and you can hook it into the oven and make a rotissoire chicken. You can get a whole chicken at the grocery store for 5€ so we are thinking of making Sunday "Chicken Sunday". Yesterday Ben discovered the Mercadona sells ciabatta rolls so since we had all this ground beef in the freezer we made burgers.

Eating here has been challenging but very fun too because Ben has come up with some delicious meals! You can still get your "American" fix on some items like syrup but it is usually expensive. I wanted maple syrup to go with french toast one morning and while we found it, it was 5€ for a 20 oz bottle. I decided it was worth it though. :)

I can only hope that when we return to the States, Ben will maintain his passion for cooking and making up his own recipes. I will give him a break every once in awhile and bake a casserole but I think I will stick the role of baking cakes, cookies, brownies and other sweets. These are more to my style because you can eat the dough while you cook or lick the bowl clean when you are finished. There isn´t anything appetizing about licking clean the bowl used to make meatballs.

Making meatballs got a little out of hand....

Chicken #1: Stuffed with lemons and garlic.

Chicken #2: rubbed with garlic and seasoned with rosemary, pepper and salt.

Baked brie: brie cheese wrapped in a pastry square and topped with a mixture of melted butter, brown sugar and finely chopped walnuts and macadamia nuts.

The huge chocolate bar we found to chop up and put in brownie-in-a-mug.