4th of July Menu: Strawberry-Spinach Salad, Buffalo Wings, and Strawberry Shortcakes

For 4th of July weekend, I wanted to make some American-y/patriotic-colored foods. I decided on these three recipes:

1. Strawberry-Spinach Salad- This recipe is mainly spinach, with strawberries, kiwis, and jicama tossed in. It also includes a recipe for honey-dijon dressing, which I am super excited to learn how to make. I think making my own dressing will make me much more likely to want to eat salads. I grew up in the country and our salads consisted of homegrown lettuces with my mom's homemade dressing. Ever since, I can hardly choke down a bag salad with store-bought dressing. Things foreign to me in this recipe: jicama. I have heard of it, and from the picture it looks like a potato-ish thing that will add some crunch to the salad, kind of like a water chestnut. We'll see if I can find one at H-E-B!

2. Buffalo Wings- Shane and I crave buffalo wings often, and would like to go to Buffalo Wild Wings (a sports bar with delicious wings) more often. However, we live on a meager budget, and the only sport we like to watch is mixed martial arts. This leaves us with limited opportunities. This recipe includes raw chicken (yikes!), as well as a recipe for bleu cheese dressing, which I am stoked about. Maybe it's working in public health, maybe it's just my natural "prissiness," as my mom would say, but I freaking don't like touching raw chicken. This is going to be an adventure. I will need to buy some kind of bleach-infused wet wipes and do a full rub down of the whole kitchen afterwards. Ew. But I am really looking forward to being able to make wings, as well as another type of salad dressing. Does anybody know what type of chicken you buy for this? Is it some special tiny chicken, or do you just buy normal wings and drumsticks?

3. Strawberry Shortcake- I am making this specifically because it looks patriotic. There is an apple crisp recipe that would probably be more American, but the strawberry shortcake is almost red, white, and blue! I could dye the shortcake and make it red, white, and blue... Hehe. This is also a good use of the rest of the strawberries from the salad, and a skill I learned from the chocolate mousse: whipped cream. I figured out that when you are making whipped cream, you add some granulated or powdered sugar to it so it tastes better.

Here goes! This is going to be quite interesting, buying raw ingredients at the grocery store and all. I have to touch the raw chicken package! Ew! The pink chicken juice seems like it's always leaking out of the wrinkles in the saran wrap on the back of those styrofoam trays. Maybe I'll put it in a veggie bag... My plan is to use the Checklist app on my iPhone, and while I'm doing my hardcore house cleaning I'll see which ingredients we have (which is likely not going to be much) and check those off. Then I'll be off to an adventure at the grocery store! I'm going to try to go one of the weekday nights this week, otherwise it will be utterly crazy with people getting ready for the 4th of July. Wish me luck!

Chocolate Mousse with Raspberries: Great Success!

The chocolate mousse with raspberries was a great success! I think it's similar to what Elizabeth made for Katherine's bridal shower, but she layered the chocolate mousse with Oreo crumbs and raspberries in parfait cups. Shane's mom had some dessert cups, so we put the mousse in those. Yum! I apologize for the crappiness of the pictures. I didn't bring my camera on this particular trip. I can't find the charger because our house is too messy. I had to take the pictures with my iPhone. Next weekend Shane is working 3 12 hour shifts in a row, so I plan on having some hardcore housewiping time. I want to clean the house and cook a few more recipes. We'll see! The first picture is of me, Shane's aunt Sheila, and Shane's mom Trisha enjoying our chocolate mousse. Shane was cracking me up with his terrible and ridiculous photography skills. The next picture is of a very happy Shane after he "wailed on" his dessert. Raspberries are his favorite. The last picture is one of the finished product. Yum!

Chocolate Mousse with Raspberries: Preparation

After a wonderful day chilling by Shane's parents' pool in Austin, I made my first recipe. I decided to start with what looked like the simplest recipe in the book, a frozen chocolate mousse. The recipe calls for whipped cream, chocolate liquer, and raspberries. It says that you can leave out the liquer, but then you have to eat the dessert cold and not frozen. The liquer would keep the mousse from freezing solid. Liquer sounds expensive, and it takes four hours to freeze the dessert, so I decided to go without it. That makes for a really easy recipe:

2 cups of heavy whipping cream

3/4 cup of Hershey's Chocolate Syrup

Whip the cream, fold in the syrup, put it in the fridge, and later put it in pretty cups with raspberries. It says to whip the cream until it forms stiff peaks. I wasn't quite satisfied with the whipped-ness of it, but it also said if you kept whipping too long it would curdle, and that just sounds gross. Newsflash: whipped cream plain does not taste good. My friend Elizabeth told me this, but she is lactose intolerant and I did not trust her, so I decided to try it myself. Whipped cream with chocolate syrup folded in, however, tastes quite delicious. Shane licked the spoon, and he agrees. He also ate several of the raspberries that were broken or fell out of the bowl. I anticipated this, and that's why I bought a huge box of raspberries (see photo). I'll post pics later of the dessert all pretty in some wine glasses!

Here goes!

In 10 months and 28 days I'm going to marry my best friend and roommate, Shane. Being the old-fashioned girl that I am at heart, I feel that I should at least attempt to learn how to cook before our wedding. So that is what I am going to do!

I got this idea from the book and movie about The Julie/Julia Project. Now let's get one thing straight: Julie knew how to cook before she started. The pages of the Betty Crocker Basic Cooking book are terrifying to me. The pages of Julia Child's cookbook would leave me in tears. A raw chicken has never set foot in my kitchen. Purchasing raw ground meat, storing it in my refrigerator for a few days fully intending to cook, and then throwing it out when it went bad is the closest I have come to cooking. This is going to be a crash course.

My plan is to cook some of the recipes from the book at least once a week, probably on Sundays so we can eat the leftovers during the week. This weekend I am going to visit Shane's family, so I think I'll start simple with a dessert. His parents usually cook for us, and I'm not one to turn down a home-cooked (by someone else) meal!

Tonight, I had two donuts (this is a rarity, but Shane brought them home from the grocery store for me today and I couldn't resist) and two slices of leftover cold pizza for dinner. I must admit, I hit an all-time low. I fully intend to turn that around starting this weekend!

The whole cook book, cover to cover, includes:

-13 main dish salads, sandwiches, and soups

-11 pasta favorites

-25 main dishes, meat to meatless

-16 great for grilling (we don't even have a grill, so we're either going to have to cook some of this on a George Foreman grill, or get a tiny Weber for our tiny balcony)

-23 side salads and veggies

-14 snacks and sweet treats

-3 get-together menus (one of these is Thanksgiving dinner, which would be REALLY ambitious for me... maybe we can do something other than force mom to cook it all for the 3 of us this year?)

So, in total, there are 105 recipes. That's about 10 recipes a month until the wedding... We'll see how this goes!!