In Which Faith Has Started Baking

One of the many things I have discovered about myself since getting married is that I love to cook.  Actually, that does not convey a proper picture.  I don't just love to cook, I love to bake.  I love the blast of heat when I pop open the oven, I love the smell of bubbling casseroles, I love the whir of my fancy KitchenAid mixer (probably the only reason I have discovered this love).  One of the best parts of my week is flipping through my cook books, deciding at what I want to try my hand, and making our grocery list.

Today I decided to combine two of my favorite things, fresh chicken and cheese (this should explain quite clearly why I was never able to make it as a vegetarian).  Chris does most of our grocery shopping these days, and has discovered that the butcher at our local Harris Teeter is better than buying pre-packaged anywhere else barring a good sale.

Thus I have started cooking with chicken that comes wrapped in paper.  Is there anything more decadent?

I made a hybrid version of Buffalo Chicken Quinoa Mac and Cheese, which uses the quinoa instead of noodles.  But we only had about half a cup, which is less than what is called for in the recipe, so I decided to improvise.  I cooked up about the same amount of penne noodles, yielding enough to fill my grandmother's casserole dish.  But the fun did not stop there.

Let me pause here a moment and explain something.  My husband is a really good cook.  He and his mother cook together all the time and have the whole kitchen thing down to a really unfair science.  I, having only recently discovered a love for baking, am quite understandably intimidated.  I have only cooked for his parents one time and that was in my crockpot. Now it seems that I am incapable of baking when Chris is home without having some disaster or another -- using the wrong skillet or forgetting ingredients -- and inevitably setting off the smoke alarm.

This is what happens when you take a recipe at its word when it says "small sauce pan".  Clearly my idea of small and the actual definition of small are not the same.

But in the end I managed to make a really delicious meal.  I used the broiler for the first time and am quite proud of the way my frankensteining of the recipe worked out.  The quinoa combined with the pasta yeilds a really interesting texture that goes a long way to distract you from how spicy the dish actually is.

Now if you'll excuse me, I still have a veggie pizza and apple scones to put in the oven (that is if I'm allowed near it again today).