Cooking Schmooking

For Christmas my dearest of dear men gave me the dvd of Julie and Julia. Ahhh bliss. I am just now finding time to sit and watch it. I saw it in the theater with my dear friend and for the weeks after I became a cooking fool.

Yes. Me. A cooking fool. I cooked everything. I experimented. I LOVED it. I dreamed of blogging like Julie Powell. In my crazy state of mind, I thought if Julie could blog her way through Julia Child's cookbook (which the title of escapes me at the moment), I could certainly blog my way through The Joy of Cooking, right?

HA! Have you seen the size of that book? It's enormous! It's huge. It would take me a lifetime and then some to blog my way through all the recipes in it. Okay, true, partly because some of the recipes I wouldn't be able to bring myself to use. Oxtail soup, anyone? I didn't think so.

It seems I can't watch the movie though, without eating something. And let me tell you, my CLIF Builders protein bar is not cutting it. I could make something luscious, because you know after all I have The Joy of Cooking cookbook.

But alas, it's not that easy for me tonight. The family is gone with our one car (that is actually a van if that really matters at all) and I should have (Oh I REALLY like this part in the movie! "Oh are you back? Please be back?" "Whats for dinner?") bought groceries already and because I hate to grocery shop so very much, I've not done it yet, so I have no food in the house.

Well that isn't entirely true. There is food, to be sure, in the house, but not the right sorts of food. Not the kinds of food one needs to have on hand to make real food...real good food.

While on the subject of food, the other day it was so snowy I craved a nice big pot of soup simmering on the stove. I sent my dear man out in the storm for the ingredients to make Minestrone. The recipe, of course, came from The Joy of Cooking. But what do you have to have to go with the soup? A nice big loaf of crusty, crunchy bread. Homemade preferably and still hot.

So I made a batch of french bread. I'll admit I tweaked the recipe a bit. Mainly because I can't seem to pay attention to directions with any sort of regularity anymore. It turned out superb! Well except I managed to follow the directions a little too closely at the end and the bread got a little dark on the bottom but it was still very good.

The bread recipe makes of course two loaves. So what did I do the extra dough? I made a scrumpdiddlyicious dessert bread. I thought of making cinnamon rolls, but I don't care for cinnamon rolls much.

Here's what I did. I melted butter and brushed it on the rolled out dough. To that I added sliced red delicious apple slices, sprinkled cinnamon and drizzled honey over the top. I folded the dough over the apples, pinched edges of the dough together and brushed butter over the top. I baked it just like I baked the bread.

Oh my stars! It was so delicious. It was best served hot, but the next day it was still good cold. I can't only begin to imagine what it would taste like with vanilla ice cream. Yummy I'm sure.

My family is now home and I have bedtime to oversee and leftover Minestrone to put away. And the movie to finish.