A cheesy situation - and many other tangents

I think I might have a problem.

We went out to The Melting Pot as planned last night for our anniversary dinner. We got what we usually get – the Big Night Out with cheddar cheese fondue, the lobster main course for Adam, and the S’mores Chocolate. Yum. I usually stick with the chicken and ravioli and dip with the ginger plum, teriyaki, and occasionally the Green Goddess (unless Adam eats it all before I get to it, which happens sometimes.) Last night I decided to branch out. I tried the mango barbecue sauce at Adam’s urging and didn’t like it at all. I still avoided the cocktail and curry sauces. But I also tried the gorgonzola port sauce. And it was wonderful.

So here’s my dilemma: I’m not a cheese person. And I’m definitely not a bleu cheese person. That whole veins of mold growing in the food thing is kind of off-putting. But this sauce was creamy, sweet but salty, delicious. I ate it on pretty much everything. This discovery has shaken my “foods I don’t like” beliefs. I even spent some time this morning trying to find a recipe for it. That’s how much I liked it. Argh. Must resist the temptation to buy gross-looking cheese.

Somewhat along the same lines, this weekend was full of fine dining. We went to Koehring's Grand Central House on Saturday with my dad and Cheryl. It’s an interesting restaurant with eclectic decorating taste. The food was great – everyone had seafood except for me – and it was a good time. We had champagne! Adam had a Schuam Torte for dessert and was then bitten with the “let’s make meringue” bug. I don’t do meringue (it’s that whole not having any patience thing. Egg whites take a while to beat) so I told him to have fun. He found a recipe on Sunday morning, went to Copps to get a carton of egg whites (since I told him we didn’t have enough eggs for him to use just the whites of since I’d have no use for just yolks and I wasn’t going to separate them for him anyway) and went to work. I don’t know what went on since I was in the bedroom watching a movie, but he beat those eggs for a long time. Like more than an hour. He baked it for an hour, let it cool, and then threw it all out when he discovered the center was still raw. Oh well. Like he said, a fun egg white experiment. Perhaps I’ll discover a well of cooking related patience some day and make some meringue and baklava and homemade ravioli. Or not…

With a steady schedule of meals out I didn’t cook much this weekend. Or at all. Adam went golfing last Thursday afternoon and I was by myself for dinner. I cooked up the gnocchi that were on the menu, but instead of making the thyme butter sauce I just cooked up a few pieces of bacon and added that. Yum. I was tempted to eat it all myself, but I was nice and left half of it for Adam to eat when he got home. Friday night I had a chicken Caesar salad with mini sliders on the menu. I discovered we had no more ground beef in the freezer (and luckily it was on sale last week so I could stock up) so I added the last two leftover chicken breasts from the cookout instead. I did make croutons (from leftover hamburger rolls) so that was good. That was pretty much the extent of my cooking for the weekend. I made frozen pizza two days in a row for lunch. So sad.

But I’m back in the saddle for this coming week. I bought three new cooking magazines in an effort to find a replacement for Cooking Light, of which I’m not much of a fan. Two Taste of Home spinoffs – Healthy Cooking and Cooking for Two, and one that appears to be Food Network related – Clean Eating. I browsed through them and found some good stuff to try out. Adam looked through the Cooking for Two issue and picked out some stuff as well. Mostly desserts. :) I plan to try out a few of those soon, although probably not this weekend since we’ll be camping.

Speaking of desserts (man, this tangent thing leads to long blog posts…) I went out and bought a cake decorating kit on Sunday afternoon. That whole mint brownie pie fiasco had gotten me thinking about the things that were still missing from my kitchen collection. I missed having a spatula when I made that pecan cake a ways back and had intended to pick one up at some point. Then with the need for pastry tips for the torte I figured I might as well go ahead and pick up a set for future use. Now I’m looking for an excuse to bake and decorate a cake. Not that I need one, really, but it would be nice to be able to justify making a cake and eating it all. Hey wait! People eat cake for anniversaries! I could just make a belated Happy Anniversary to Us cake. There. Perfect.

On another tangent, speaking of camping, we decided that we’ll go for only one night this time. There’s not a lot going on up in Door County this weekend and we really can’t come up with things to keep us busy for two days. We’re also going minimalistic, planning to eat our meals at restaurants rather than cook at the campsite. We’ll still be sleeping in a tent so that still counts as camping in my mind. We also plan to do the s’mores/campfire thing so it’s kind of authentic. We plan to head to Washington Island, stop at the candy store we like, maybe do a winery tour. With the crappy growing season, cherry crops suck so there’s no picking going on anymore. That’s really about all we can figure to do without spending lots of money or too much time out in the sun. I think we’ll still have a good time as long as the weather is good.

Ok, I’m going to cut this off before I go on way too long. Even though I watched two movies. That will have to be in another entry.