Day 249 - Mexican Panaderia

Ok, so there is a lot of food talk on this blog recently.  It's the baby's fault.  I seriously have the appetite of a 13 year old boy right now.  

A couple of months ago, my friend Minda introduced me to a Mexican bakery here in Austin called Chuy's. (Not the Tex-Mex restaurant)  She took me to have tortas for lunch. This was good because she ordered in Spanish and I don't speak Spanish.  The tortas were divine.  THEN I discovered the bakery on the other side of the restaurant.  Oh. My. Heavens. Delightful.

Just this Saturday I took Ben there to buy bread bowls for the potato soup.  Once he laid eyes on the baked goods laid out before him, he had to give them a try.  We bought a churro, a sausage kolache, three bread bowls and a pound cake muffin thingey.
It cost us $4.50.
Angels sang.
I wept.
 No one needed to speak Spanish.
Baked goods are a universal language. 

So imagine my lack of surprise when this morning Ben asked me if I was going back to Chuy's today.  Needless to say we did.  We got a strawberry empanada (HEAVEN), yellow cake with coconut frosting, another churro and two more pound cake muffin thingeys. Ben didn't want to share the pound cake this time.  All of this for a measly $3.50.   

We did not eat it all.  In fact, we just ate the empanada and the cake.  I think Ben would have ate the muffin too. 

Anyway, here is their yelp page. 

Chuy's Bakery

 If you are ever in Austin to see us, remind me to take you there.

Day 248 - Peanut Butter Pork

Every once in awhile I have a cooking fail.  While tonight's dinner was nowhere near a fail, there was something about it that just wasn't quite right.  I liked it.  Ben liked it,  In fact, after dinner he kept eating the pork right off the cooking board so it must not have been too bad.  Despite this evidence, I still think it was missing something.  So. . .  Here is the link to the recipe.

Asian Peanut Butter Pork

Will someone else please make it and tell me what it needs?  Some heat?  A sauce?  More acid?  Please people, I'm begging you.  Solve the mystery of Asian Peanut Butter Pork.  It'll help me sleep at night.

Baked Potato Soup

In my last post I linked to the recipe that I used for Baked Potato Soup.  Then I realized that like most things, I didn't really follow the recipe exactly.  So here it is with a few minor Tracey changes.  

Baked Potato Soup 

Ingredients

• 6 bacon strips, diced
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 2 clove garlic, minced
• 6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoon dried basil
• 1 teaspoon pepper
• 6 cups chicken broth
• 4 large baked potatoes, peeled and cubed (
• 2 cup half-and-half cream
• Shredded Cheddar cheese
• Minced fresh parsley

Directions

1. Bake potatoes in oven until cooked through.  
2. In a large dutch oven. cook bacon until crisp. 
3. Drain, leaving one 1 tablespoon drippings in the pan. Set bacon aside. 
4. Saute onion and garlic in the drippings until tender.  I cook them FOREVER until almost caramelized.  If you are aggressive while doing this you can get a lot of the burnt bacon off the bottom of the pan.  That is, if you are like me and have burnt bacon bits on the bottom of the pan.  
5. Make a roux by adding in some of the bacon fat and the flour.  This should be brown and bubbly. It is hard to tell around the onions but just do you best in order to cook out the flour flavor.  Unless it starts smoking you can't rook a roux too long.  
6. Stir in salt, basil and pepper; mix well. Gradually add broth. Bring to boil; boil and stir for 2 minutes. While stirring, finish using the liquid to deglaze the bottom of the pan.  Get as much of that bacon goodness as you can.  
7. Add half of the potatoes.  At this point I used my immersion blender to blend the potatoes and onions into a creamy mixture.  I like my soup kind of thick and we don't like onion chunks. 
8. Add the rest of the potatoes, half of the bacon, half-and half cream and hot pepper sauce; heat through but do not boil. 
9. Garnish with leftover bacon, cheese and parsley.

Day 247 - Fall

As you will read in the next post, I just spent a lovely 5 days in New England.  Fall days in New England.  I wore a jacket and ate soup.  I got rained on.  I shot lots of photos.  

Today it rained in Texas!  It was very exciting.  So since it is October and rainy, the only thing I could possibly do was make baked potato soup.  Then as I was cooking I realized I was really hot.  Possibly because it is still 82 degrees outside . . . in the rain . . . in October. 

It was still delicious.  Here's the recipe.

Baked Potato Soup

And We're Back!

We are back from hiatus.  The last two weeks have been filled to the brim so it was time to take a short photo break for the following:

Sam is in school now.  Every morning, every day.  We are thrilled.  He has been making some wonderful progress and his speech is becoming clearer every day.  He LOVES school and his lovely teachers.

Ben's parents came for a visit last weekend.  Sam loved every second of it.  I left town but they found plenty to do.  Ben took them to the Farmer's Market where they picked up some persimmon and some pork chops.  Random but apparently delicious.  They also went to the Natural Bridge safari park.  Apparently, this is not the place for me as there is a giant scary ostrich.  I'm totally ok with missing that business.  Here is a little video from their adventure.

Finally, I was able to go spend five lovely (and rainy) days in Concord, NH with my dear friend Shannon (known as Sister Harmon the missionary to you Nebraska folks)  For the last couple of years, I have made an annual trip to do photos for her and her friends.  They live on campus at St. Paul's School which could quite possibly be the most lovely campus on earth. I have 13 shoots scheduled.  We had rain every day but for some reason I was super blessed and the rain stopped for most of our shoots.  Although I have a million more photos to sort through, here are a couple of little samples from my trip.