Mother's Day Menu

In honor of my newfound cooking skills, I made dinner for my family for Mother's Day.

The menu:

Starter -- Salt-crusted fingerling potatoes
Main -- Skirt steak with shallot-thyme butter served with asparagus with morels and tarragon
Dessert -- French apple tart

Order of cooking:

1. French apple tart
2. Salt-crusted fingerling potatoes
3. Asparagus with morels and tarragon
4. Skirt steak with shallot-thyme butter

My thoughts: Everything came out great except for the asparagus which was overcooked and the sauce did not thicken very much. I think I prefer a more simple asparagus dish but the sauce is very good for the mushrooms.

I used pre-made frozen dough (Pepperidge Farm) instead of making it myself. It came out perfectly. For the Pepperidge Farm frozen dough, the recipe should be cut in half.

Thank you, Mark Bittman

Some people are whizzes at cooking. They know what flavors go well together, what seasonings to add to enhance flavor, etc. I am not a cooking whiz. I am a cooking idiot. Once I almost set my kitchen on fire while boiling water (luckily the sink was next to the stove). I can barely decipher recipes. There's always some ingredient I've never heard of, a technique I have no clue about, or some kitchen appliance or dish I can never find in the store. For most of my life, my two "homemade" dishes were spaghetti (with sauce out of a jar) and steak.

Then, one day, I came across Mark Bittman's Bitten blog at The New York Times. Oh, happy day! Finally I was able to leave the land of spaghetti and steak! The recipes were simple. I knew what the ingredients were AND I could find them at my local grocery store. I didn't need new equipment. Not matter how hard I tried, even I couldn't mess it up. Since then, I've tried a number of the recipes on the blog and every one of them has been a success. Thank you, Mark Bittman, for helping me enter the world of cooking.