Dawn Brocco's Life & Design Blog

Today was a a tired and resting day, until 2 pm, when I dragged myself off the loveseat and spent 3+ hours making a roast beef, gravy, glazed carrots, mashed potatoes and sauteed onions, while hubby was off at his 2nd job.

I also whipped up a batch of yogurt smoothie, which helps me take all these pills!, and a batch of iced tea. Dessert is the apple crisp I made yesterday. Boy, I'm good!

Back to the loveseat and some knitting, while hubby cleans up the cooking mess.

I did catch the last few minutes of a PBS cooking show (I hadn't seen before) with a woman (I don't know who she was) making Julia's Beouf Bourguignon. One of these days I'll make one.

I have a small sirloin roast in the freezer I can cut up for it - just need wine, mushrooms and more bacon, as I cooked the package of bacon I had yesterday, despite hubby insisting that *he* was gonna do it, as my first attempt was much less that perfect.

But I finally got it right. Very low heat and drain all the fat from each batch of bacon before putting in more strips, or else the pan ends up with enough fat to swim in and splatters like mad.

America's Test Kitchen was doing maple-glazed pork tenderloins and thick, pan cooked pork chops. I'm not a big pork fan, it's just so hard to digest.


Lidia was doing a chicken with beer recipe and dumplings with speck. Eh on the beer. There was chicken stock and unfiltered apple cider to simmer the chicken in, which sounded good, but beer? I've never liked beer.

And the dumplings, like German knödel, looked really yummy - milk-soaked old bread cubes, grated cheese (looked like parmesan), cooked diced speck (prosciuto) and it looked like onions (missed bits of this show while I was cooking), chopped parsley and chives, salt, pepper, a little flour to bind it all. Make soft balls, roll in flour, then boil til they float, coat in melted butter, sprinkle on more cheese. Gotta try these one day.