5 Things...

So, anyone who visited my blog soon after my launch and then recently has noticed that I sort of stopped posting for a few weeks. Then on Sunday I posted as part of the fun blogging event known as Sugar High Fridays. What you don't know is that I did have several postings planned during that intermission, but, despite the best of intentions, I never actually finished any of them (I started writing two of them, but stopped because I couldn't get photos that I was happy with).

So a couple of weeks ago (by which I mean nearly a month ago) I was tagged by the blogger formerly known as D-Man of Sourdough Monkey Wrangler (who is a hilarious writer – so says my fiancé Dana and I must agree) to write about 5 things you don't know about me. So here goes, in no particular order:

The Five Things You Didn’t Know About Me:

1. I cannot follow a recipe – even when I try. And I have because I test recipes for this fun little site (James Beard award-winning actually) called Leite's Culinaria and we're required to prepare the recipes exactly as written (with one exception, we are allowed to cut a recipe in half). What this ultimately means is I usually try a recipe, fail to follow it, and then I have to make it again to give it a proper review. This does, occasionally, yield tasty alternate versions – like the brownies I made this month where I accidentally left out the baking powder - I like them better that way.
2. I love my KitchenAid boat motor a.k.a. my 5-quart Professional KitchenAid Mixer complete with pasta and ice cream attachments. The boat motor nomenclature comes courtesy of my in-house marketing guru.
3. There is one flavor that you will never find in my cooking and that I go to fairly great lengths to avoid in restaurants. I'll shamelessly badger waitresses and waiters to be sure that a meal does not contain this. This hateful flavor hides in several cuisines and comes in several guises – most commonly known as fennel or black licorice. Also, beets taste like sweet dirt and are the only food that makes me want to vomit - blech.
4. I am an ardent lover of all things pork. My latest passion is for La Quercia prosciutto and speck. You should check them out – high quality pork slowly and carefully transformed into an artisan product that compels me to do my happy dance when it arrives on my doorstep.
5. I have been reading food blogs for years, but have I never left a comment until I was getting ready to launch my own blog and until now I hadn't responded to any of the comments left on my blog (if this counts as a response). Woot, I just googled Roasting Rambler and my blog pops up at number 5!

Now to help explain my absence from Roasting Rambler over the last few weeks I will share a sample of my poor attempts at food porn. This was a delicious meal and one of the few times that I have (almost) followed a recipe exactly (No recipe, but I'll include a link). I work at a university and have friends both in college and graduated like me. It happened to be spring break and while several friends were cavorting in Italy, I invited Alex (friend and roommate of said friends) and Katie (a long-term substitute Home Ec teacher who just landed her first permanent gig – congrats again!) over for dinner.

Now like other obsessed people I bookmark, cut out, rip out, and copy far more recipes than I ever try, but this particular recipe kept coming back to the top of my list - Asian Pesto Chicken Salad (from Simply Ming and brought to my attention by Leite’s Culinaria). I say I almost followed the recipe in that I did not measure the herbs, per se; instead, I measured by the handful.

I hadn’t intended to use this for the blog, but as we were getting ready to sit down to eat (thanks much to both my companions for their help getting dinner pulled together) I grabbed my camera and snapped a few quick snapshots. The first shot above is probably the better shot because as you can see the shot below is focused on the napkin (have to remember to keep them out of the shots because my mom doesn’t really know how many of those I have walked off with over the years).