Adventures in Cooking

I got this idea from a former co-worker of mine who had started a food blog posting pictures and comments about food she had prepared as well as eaten at various restaurants. Since I love to cook and am always trying out new recipes, I thought it would be a neat idea to try something like this myself. Although my past track record with online journal type thingees is spotty, I'm hoping this is something I can stick to, and hopefully share some good recipes with friends and family as well.

Randy and I have been watching a lot of mafia-related programming lately (including the first season of Boardwalk Empire and seasons one through six of The Sopranos) and I was looking around in Dollarama not too long ago when I came upon an actual sweet find. They had a hardcover book called "Entertaining with the Sopranos" that had once been 35 bucks in a book store but was at Dollarama for 2 bucks. It's full of all kibds of delicious Italian food recipes, many of which were featured on the show (as the characters seem to be always eating). There are several very complicated looking recipes in the book as well as many with obscure ingredients you'd likely never find in Grand Falls, but there are a few that seemed do-able (and for 2 bucks, really, who can complain?).

I tried my first recipe in this cookbook two days ago - Spaghetti Pie. Sounds disgusting, but it was kind of like a big frittata and a pizza combined, with a little spaghetti (okay, a lot) thrown in for good measure. The finished product came out like this:

Some of the spaghetti singed a little on top because I put it under the broiler maybe a minute too long, but other than that, it was cooked perfectly. The pink stuff you see in it is proscuitto and italian-style salami (called for Genoa salami but Sobeys was out of it). Besides that, it just has eggs in it, provolone cheese, pecorino-romano cheese and whole wheat spaghetti. Not sure if you can tell by the pic, but this thing was massive. It's supposed to serve eight so we ate it for lunches and suppers for a couple days.
This is what I served it with the day I made it:

This recipe was fairly tasty, especially with ketchup, but I found that it didn't really call for enough meat. The eggs and spaghetti tended to overwhelm the sharp taste of the proscuitto and pecorino-romano cheese so if I were to make it again, I would definitely add more meat. I'd give it a 6 out of 10 (with room for improvement).

Tonight's menu? Chicken and Cheese Enchiladas!