No less than the stars!

Cooking: Kinda makes you feel bad about yourself

Why do I say this?  Because the new recipes I try NEVER look or taste half as good as the Food Network people make you think.  Giada de Laurentiis makes her seafood stew look like the easiest thing EVER until you head on out to the store to try and make it yourself.  In real life, it occurs to you that seafood is ridiculously expensive, you don't have a Dutch oven, your store doesn't carry flat-leaf parsley, and any number of other things that are important to the recipe's success.  So you end up making a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup like every other night of your life.  Not to mention that when you DO find all these ingredients in your grocery store, you end up burning the bottom of the fish when you put it in the pan, most of the parsley ends up on the floor, and clam stock smells so disgusting you can't finish the process.  So yeah... I love to cook, but I have to be okay with failure more often than not.  Live and learn.

The three best things I ever ate

So this is one of those "My life is boring, so I have nothing to blog about" kind of evenings.  I will now attempt to entertain you with a list you care nothing about  I now give you the three best things I ever ate.  Enjoy!

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1. Lightly breaded grouper at some place in Fort Myers, FL
I was 16 years old, and I was on vacation with a friend of mine.  She, her parents, and I went to this ridiculously overpriced seafood place right on the docks (the name is lost to me).  The only thing I ordered was the grouper and a baked potato.  Potatoes are potatoes, but this grouper was legendary!  The breading must have been panko crumbs looking back on it, because it was so flaky and not obviously a fried item.  It actually may have been coated in the panko and baked.  But nonetheless, it was very tasty.  Very tender, not fishy at all.  Just needed a squeeze of lemon and it was good to go.

2. Creamy tomato soup with a grilled cheese sandwich from Cafe 4 in Market Square
Call me simple, call me uncreative, call me whatever you like.  But this was comfort good at its best.  If I had had a cold at the time, it would have been an even more memorable experience.  But this soup!  Oh, this soup!  It was the creamiest I have ever tasted in my entire existence.  I love the restaurant itself because they only use fresh produce that is locally grown.  I was guaranteed that they bought their own tomatoes from local growers and didn't just take the easy way out with a can of Hunt's "produce."  I wouldn't have been surprised if they'd milked the cow and made the cream themselves, too.  I just remember thinking how wholesome the soup was because of what went into making it (both produce-wise and labor-wise).

3. My grandmother's chocolate chip cookies
Granted, she used the recipe off the back of the Nestle Toll House chocolate chip, but I could be a thousand miles away and as long as I had those cookies, I was home.