O - One on One Cooking Lesson

As I've gotten older, I'm really enjoying cooking. I am obsessed with Food Network and cooking shows. I tape The Chew everyday and watch it when I get home from work. Every Day. I've started to collect cookbooks even though there are thousands of recipes online. But I really want is to have a one-on-one cooking lesson.

Here I am with Michael Symon. I went to an event and got an autographed cookbook from him. I would definitely take a lesson with him. I do learn a lot watching him cook on tv. I think his style suits my tastes. His most recent cookbook 5 in 5 really is easy to follow. I highly recommend it.

I also like watching Carla Hall cook. I've got one of her cookbooks and I'm not as impressed with her recipes. But I think she can teach people well. Plus she could teach me tomorrow's post (just wait and read).

But maybe I just need to find a local chef to help me with some dishes. I keep thinking that now that I have a Kitchenaid mixer, I should get the pasta attachments. But we don't eat as much pasta as we used to and I'm afraid that would be a waste of money.

I need to learn some knife skills. Dan cringes when he sees me chop. Normally he's the chopper of the family.

Friday Fragments - James Bond is BACK!!!

I'm joining up with Mrs. 4444 for Friday Fragments.

 

The new James Bond movie comes out today. It is getting great reviews. Whitney and I are going to go see it during Thanksgiving break. Yes I can last that long. After all I have a photo of Skyfall on my ipad as my backdrop. I even wrote about the movie in January 2011. That's how excited I was.

I had a blog post all typed up about walking around Embassy Row in Washington DC and then I lost it when I was at the airport. I'm going to recreate it and post over the weekend hopefully.

Top Chef started this week along with The Next Iron Chef. I do believe my cooking competition show fix will be taken care of. Add that to my daily watching of The Chew and I should be ok. I hope everyone got to read my post over the weekend about seeing Carla Hall and Michael Symon at the Metro DC Cooking Show. I'm still telling people about it here. People must think I'm a stalker.

I can't believe in two weeks it is Thanksgiving. I have no room in the freezer to buy any turkey yet and I saw that Target had Butterball's at a decent price. Guess I'll have to wait another week and hopefully be able to either clear it out or get it close enough so it can thaw in the fridge and then we will brine it.

I still have to buy a Christmas tree too. Last year we threw away our old one and I need to replace it. Nothing has looked good and we always put it up the day after Thanksgiving. Just another thing to get done quickly.

I also need to get my oil changed (I love that my car tells me it is time) and I need to pick a paint color and paint a room so I can blog about it in the next two weeks. I would like to get my carpets cleaned before I decorate too. 

My conference provided me with lots of good information (it is nice when that happens) and I also got a lot of good information to study for my certification test which is scheduled for December 4.

My Date with Chefs

I'm in Washington, D.C. for a work conference. I got here early to go to a test review course and saw on my twitter feed that said my favorite celebrity chefs, Carla Hall and Michael Symon were going to be at a food convention here on Sunday. On a lark I checked out the tickets and when I found one in row eight I jumped and bought a ticket. I also go an autographed copy of either of their books plus admission to the convention center.

I got there early and started sampling all the food that was there. I saw where Michael Symon was autographing books. I went over just to take his picture (I know very geeky) and then I found out if you bought any of his books you could get an autograph and photo. Woohoo. I was sold. So I bought The Chew cookbook and got in line which wasn't long at all.







He was very nice.

Later I went to the cooking demo. I've loved Carla from her first season on Top Chef and I watch The Chew every day. The camaraderie you see on tv is really true. The two of them were so great together.













Sorry for the quality but it was no flash photography and I had the camera guy right in front.

Needless to say I loved my day. My autographed copy of Carla Hall's book is going to ship to me. They got held up in NYC from Sandy and since they don't come out until Tuesday they just couldn't just go to a store to get them.

So two autograph books and photo with a chef. Not bad for a work trip!