The June Daring Cooks’ challenge sure kept us rolling – meatballs, that is! Shelley from C Mom Cook and Ruth from The Crafts of Mommyhood challenged us to try meatballs from around the world and to create our own meatball meal celebrating a culture or cuisine of our own choice.

I have a confession to make – I’ve never made meatballs before!  I’ve bought them, and I’ve eaten them, and I like them, but I’ve never actually made them!  This made for a perfect June challenge.

Since I’m not a meatball pro, I went for a simple Italian meatball.  I mixed 1 pound of ground beef, 1 chopped onion, 1 garlic clove, 1 egg, 1/2 c bread crumbs, and salt/pepper, formed balls, and baked everything for 35 minutes at 350 *F.

Yum!

And paired with a tasty pasta, this made for a delicious meal!

Our new CSA started yesterday!  We’re mostly in the land of leafy greens, but I think it’s going to be awesome!  Two years ago, we wound up with more produce than we knew what to do with during the peak of summer.  This year, we went in with our friends N&A to share and enjoy the delicious produce.

The first set includes dried chilis, rhubarb (which D is super excited about), green onions, Asian green onions, and spinach.

We also got some delicious-looking salad mix.  Yum!

I’m so excited that we’re finally getting into produce season here – I think it’s going to be a great summer!

Our lovely Monkey Queen of Don’t Make Me Call My Flying Monkeys, was our May Daring Cooks’ hostess and she challenged us to dive into the world of en Croute! We were encouraged to make Beef Wellington, Stuffed Mushroom en Croute and to bring our kids into the challenge by encouraging them to create their own en Croute recipes!

Once again, I am incredibly late at posting this.  We even made and served this before the 14th (which is the official date-to-post), but, well, May has been a very busy month for me.

That being said, mmmmmmmmmmmmm.  This was delicious, fun, and not too difficult to do!

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Natalia of Gatti Fili e Farina challenges us to make a traditional Savarin, complete with soaking syrup and cream filling! We were to follow the Savarin recipe but were allowed to be creative with the soaking syrup and filling, allowing us to come up with some very delicious cakes.

I had never heard of a savarin before this challenge, but it sounded pretty interesting and like the perfect party treat.  After searching for a bundt pan (No, I don’t own one.  Yes, I know this possibly makes me less of an awesome baker.  You know what?  Maybe someday when I have more space, but right now, it’s not a big deal!), I made this:

Doesn’t it look… decadent?  And delicious?  The pairing of the pastry cream filling with the cake and strawberries was really good.  I think this might fall in the category of too much work without enough reward, but it was an awesome dessert to try out!  (And the next time I see it on a dessert menu at a restaurant, I’m there!)

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Remember that chicken I deboned?  Surely you didn’t think I let the rest of it go to waste!  No – instead I made homemade chicken stock for the first time ever, and it was awesome!  I threw in the bones and various innards along with celery, carrots, onions, and a bunch of water.  After simmering it for four hours, I wound up with this:

Success!  And it was delicious, too!  I wound up making two different soups out of this: a vegetable-noodle soup that I didn’t take a picture of, and a potato-leek soup with onions.

I think if there was ever a reason to debone chickens more often, it would be for the stock.  This stuff was amazing, and gave a nice, rich undertone to the soups.

After our delicious description of the main course for Easter, it only seems fair to highlight the rest of our fare!  Our good friends N&A, and their two boys N&L, came over to celebrate and enjoy some tasty food.  They brought some deliciously roasted asparagus and cheesy scalloped potatoes to the party, and they were seriously yum!

D pulled a tasty bottle of wine, too.

He’s been into rioja’s recently and tries to find reasons to serve them whenever he can.  =]

For dessert, D whipped up a delicious black bottom custard pie, which was spectacular!

(Trust me – there’s chocolatey goodness buried deep inside.)

It was a wonderful and blessed Easter, and we were thankful to share it with good friends and delicious food!

For the April Daring Cooks Challenge, Lisa from Parsley, Sage and Sweet has challenged us to debone a whole chicken, using this video by Jacques Pepin as our guide; then stuff it, tie it and roast it, to create a Chicken Ballotine.

Friends – this was a doozy of a challenge, but I think that added to its charm!  I don’t know that this will become a regular way of preparing chicken for the time being, but it was interesting and made for a spectacular Easter dinner!

And yes, I did use a video to guide me through the process.  Jacques Pepin is a master at this – he goes through it slowly-ish in the video, but claims that anyone can debone a chicken in 1 minute.  Hah!  But I could see after a try or two it only taking 10ish minutes to do the whole thing, which is pretty reasonable.  And after all, why wouldn’t you when a little bit of work can give you this:

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D and I both love bread.  How could you not?  It’s just so delicious!

A few weeks ago, I felt like making bread from scratch.  Normally this falls into D’s turf, but he was doing other things and the bread sounded delicious.

Mmmmmm.  See?  Doesn’t that look awesome?

We used the first loaf as a side with dinner, which was yummy, but then the second loaf sat around.  And sat.  And got stale.  By the time it gets to that stage, we often wind up throwing it away.  (We’re talking really stale!)  But this time, I make a delicious, decadent, chocolate bread pudding, and it was /amazing/.  (And I normally don’t like bread pudding!)

So, the next time you find yourself with stale-ish bread and nothing to do with it, bread pudding may be a good option!

Sarah from All Our Fingers in the Pie was our February 2013 Daring Bakers’ host and she challenges us to use our creativity in making our own Crisp Flatbreads and Crackers!

So, I’m obviously a little bit late in posting this… but, it was an awesome challenge, and it would be a shame to let it die in a dusty pile.  These were pretty easy to do, and they went perfectly with the hummus D made for the evening.  Yum!

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We’re still cooking, I promise!

That being said, D has been focusing a bit more of his time and energy on his photography hobbies, and I’ve been frantically doing research and other miscellaneous tasks with the goal of graduating some time soon.  That being said, our time to regularly update has been limited.  Plus, wordpress migrated to some new features, which killed the recipe portion of our blog.  Sigh.

But fear not!  I finally got a huge set of pictures off of the camera, so there will be new posts going up this week (and maybe even later today!).

Happy cooking, friends.  =]