Cooking with Abandon

So the Halloween dinner party went pretty well, though most people weren't able to stay very long past the actual dinner. Some stayed around for the movie, and a pretty good time was had by all.

Recipes that were a hit: definitely the pumpkin shaped cheese ball, which we'll have to put the recipe up for. Also the smores brownies were enjoyed. We deep fried some chicken tenders (pre-cooked) and then tossed some in buffalo sauce and the others in bbq sauce.

The pumpkin tomato basil soup from a couple of posts ago went over pretty well. I fudged a lot of it; I didn't use fresh pumpkin, but instead chose canned pumpkin. It went well, but despite the much larger ratio of pumpkin to tomato, it still had a distinctly tomato taste. Also, there was much too much of it. Even having some leftovers for the next day or two, I still threw most of it out. Must scale back the recipe.

I've been wanting to learn more about Blogger for a while. Livejournal isn't as customizable as I would like it to be (at least not for free). So instead of completely migrating over to blogger, I am starting a recipe blog. Valerie and I spent a lot of time cooking and trying out recipes. We have started working on vegetarian and vegan recipes to eventually adopt that lifestyle (if we like it).

This blog will mostly be for us to organize recipes we find and note if we tried them, what we changed, and what we like. Comments and suggestions are greatly welcomed.

I've chosen the name Cooking with Abandon because I stumbled on this quote by Harriet von Horne: "Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all." I found it fairly appropriate because experimenting with cooking is something we do together as a couple.

Also, I will note where all our recipes come from, because most likely, they will not be original for a while.