Cooking for the Wei Family

There are reason why I've been making an effort to try new recipes and becoming better at cooking. And one of those main reasons is to one day cook a proper and complete meal for my family.

But, cooking for my family is not easy. I would know, I've tried unsuccessfully in the past but I'm not giving up. I'd like to say it's not because I'm a terrible cook but more because it's hard to accommodate for everyone. I have no idea how my Mother does it each night.

Sorcery and magic probably.

My Father is probably the biggest problem for me. First, he's a vegetarian, fish counts as a meat, egg doesn't. With these restrictions it generally means that I need to cook an entire separate vegetarian dish just for him. And I need to make sure I make enough to actually feed him.

Also, he hates onions and garlic, anything even related to them he also hates. So no leeks and sometimes even chives. This further reduces the number of vegetarian recipes I can use or variations of other recipes. Often if I'm modifying a recipe to cook for him I'm removing quite a lot and whatever I've made tastes really bland at the end.

I'll be honest, I think his favorite food is whatever Mom cooks for him. Which is sweet but a pain for me.

I hope you don't mind me "cooking" you this forever Dad.

My Mother and sister aren't much better. Mom prefers Chinese food (surprise surprise) and both of them hate fatty, deep fried, greasy or anything that would qualify as "rich" food. At least my sister likes soup BUT only if it's chunky. She hates blended soups.

And then we have my brother. He hates soup, he hates pasta, and he hates my cooking. He likes meat and prefers to cook his own food.

Myself? I'm not too picky as long as it's not vegetarian, Chinese and I'm not allergic to it.

Why do I even bother?

So we got quite the predicament here. What with all these restriction and my limited abilities. I'll keep trying though, I'll eventually work something out.

Feel free to suggest recipes or other things for me to try. I'm getting tired of looking through cookbooks.

Italian Wedding Soup and Updates

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone who offered help and suggestions with improving my blog and/or getting my own domain. I will be trying to get in touch with a few of you sometime in the near future, don't take offense if I don't send you an email. It's not that I don't like you or anything but I can only ask so many people for help!


Now let's get to cooking.

I love soup. It's way up there on my list of favorite things to eat. Coincidentally, soup is the only thing that I can ever cook with any consistency.

So when Lizzy made an entire blog post about soup and soup recipes I was determined to try and make one. One soup stuck out in particular, the Italian Wedding Soup recipe. Why? Because she decided to add this message at the top:

"First up...simple and impossible to mess up:"

First things though, I decided to omit celery from the recipe because we didn't have any at home (and I hate celery) and I used macaroni for pasta because I'm a poor University student.

And while we're on the topic of first things, first problem I encountered was that a lot of my meatballs decided to fall apart and split in half. :(

Crumbling monstrosities...

Maybe I wasn't gentle enough with them. Perhaps I added too many sauteed onions to the mixture or maybe I should have just thrown them into the soup instead of trying to cook them for a bit first. No matter, the point is, I had misshapen and fragmented meatballs in my soup.

And here we have a final product:

Looks a lot nicer than the stuff in the pot. But looks are deceiving.

The biggest issue I had when making this soup was that it was way too salty. This could be due to the brand of chicken broth I used. Or maybe it's because I decided to use regular ground beef for the meatballs.

And then pour the meat drippings and fat from the pan into the soup.

. . . .

Derp.

But other than that I think the soup turned out fairly decently. So I guess you win Lizzy. Only took me an hour to make and I'm excited to try cooking or baking something else again in the future. Though not the lobster bisque because WHY ARE LOBSTER TAILS SO EXPENSIVE?!

Oh and for those that are wondering, I'm still working on that hollow book. Slow and steady.