Cooking with Alan

Alan got a couple new books this Christmas and both have to do with cooking.

He's had his nose in this book for the past couple weeks.


There was a recipe for bread you don't have to knead. Super easy and super yummy!


On Saturday he made up a huge batch of it to use for pizza dough.
This stuffed pizza was a real hit! The boys just inhaled it!! We filled it with mushrooms, spinach and onions.


This was the pesto chicken pizza and we also made a veggie one. We had a LOT of pizza!


And this is what we drank with it. Alan is always good at choosing some good wine. This was a really good inexpensive (I think) zinfandel.


And speaking of pairing wine with food, this is the other book that Alan got as a gift.


The first recipe he tried was lentil stew with homemade fennel sausages. He made the sausages using his new meat grinder (also a Christmas gift).

The fennel, carrots, leek and herbs are from our garden.




I wasn't sure what the boys would think of this, but they LOVED it!!


And this is what we drank, a carmenere.


Then there is cooking with Patty......
We had some nice turnips in the garden so I found a recipe for a creamy root vegetable stew that looked good. I spent quite a bit of time peeling and dicing all those veggies then making the stew. I put part of the stew in the blender to puree it, but failed to realize that the plastic insert for the cover was in the blender. It made a horrid noise and like a dummy I dumped the semi-pureed stew in with the rest of the stew in order to find out what the noise was. Now there were bits of plastic in the entire stew! I had to toss it all down the drain! What a waste. No pictures of that disaster.