Tales from Astoria: Food...food...food.

One of things I love most about being married is that I get to cook pretty much whatever I think would be nice to have for dinner. I received so many cookbooks and recipes over the last year. I can't wait to cook them all.

On Tuesday, my mom, her friend, and I went to see Eat, Pray, Love in the city. After watching Julia Roberts devour Italian food for at least a half hour, we went to Simply Pasta and had pasta. Then yesterday, Carolyn and I went to Trattoria El Greco and had some more pasta! After watching, Eat, Pray, Love all I can think about is enjoying food, whether I make it or someone else.

This morning, I watched Julie & Julia (one of my favorite movies). Amy Adams (Julie) starts a blog about cooking Julia Childs food. While watching the movie, I pull out How To Cook Everything and started looking for what I was going to cook for dinner. (Yes, it was only 10 AM but, I WANTED TO COOK!)

On Monday, I went produce shopping around the corner and bought a ton of fruit and veggies. On Tuesday, I pulled out our new citrus juicer and started making fresh orange juice every morning. I LOVE FRESH OJ! Brooklyn Bagel Co. serves fresh OJ but, it's $4 a cup. While it was a nice treat every now and then, you can't beat two glasses of OJ for $0.99. I'll definitely be going back to get more oranges!!! After discovering the wonders of our citrus juicer that left, the mushrooms, peppers, and onions.

Now, I know you can put those on burgers & steak but, I wanted something a bit different. (After all, I have all of these cookbooks!) After looking up mushrooms, I discovered that there was a recipe for mushroom stir fry that included peppers and onions (and all of the frozen vegetables in our freezer). The recipe called for mushroom stock. So, that's where I started...

Later on I thought that I had way too much onion to simply make stir fry . So, I went back to the cook book and looked up onion. I found a recipe for onion soup that called for the mushroom stock that I made earlier. Simple... throw some spices into the pot, chop onions, (embrace my inner Julia Child) throw in some butter and cook!

If you are going to have onion soup, you need to have french bread! Instead of going to one of the nine gazillion bakeries in the area, I went to Associated. Guess what kind of break I got!?!?!?! Teixeira's Bakery French Bread!!