Culinary Quest

This weekend, I fulfilled three of my food wishes. On Saturday, Josh and I went to Chelsea Market (also where Food Network films Emeril Live). We didn't buy very much, just two lovely little desserts. The vanilla flower cupcake on the left, and a chocolate mousse tart (seen above). They came from Ruthy's Bakery and they were so yummy! Then again, if you cover anything in buttercream, I'm very likely to find it yummy.


Later that day, I made lasagna for the first time. I remember my aunt used to make lasagna a lot and my dad complained that it was dry and that Stouffer's lasagna was better. From then on, I assumed that lasagna was difficult to make if my aunt couldn't make it like something that came out of a box. However, I've been thinking about making this recipe for a few months now and figured that the only way to know if lasagna is really hard to make is to actually try.

I can say that I'm glad I tried the recipe (and so is Josh), because the lasagna turned out great! The only snag I encountered was the fact that the market didn't have any turkey sausage, so I used chicken sausage instead. It also made a lot of food (as I discovered when I hefted it into the oven) and made the apartment smell wonderful. The picture there really doesn't do it justice.

Today, I continued my quest for the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Last Sunday, I had a great tasting cookie, but it was too crunchy, so I followed Alton Brown's recipe for a chewy cookie and got pretty good results, combining the tasty recipe with the chewy one. I'm still not where I want to be though. The cookies came out a little too flat, so I'm going to try Alton's puffy chocolate chip cookie recipe next time, which uses cake flour instead. Who knew chocolate chip cookies could be so complicated?