The Domestic Goddess

Helloooooo!

I hope everyone's having a great week! I, for some unknown reason, have been on a rampage this week. 

The target: MY HOUSE!

I don't know what's got into me but I've been cooking and cleaning like a mad woman over here. And unfortunately I decided to do the cleaning first which means that after all this cooking the place went immediately back to looking like a back alley dumpster site in a matter of minutes. Brilliant Tara! Now I have to clean it all again! But actually I'm feeling pretty over this Extreme Housewife business so I don't think I'll bother. 

As for for the cleaning...blah, that's not a very interesting story so we'll skip that part and just talk about the cooking.

So first I made apple sauce which isn't a big deal but it's a favourite in our house. Even if you're completely useless in the kitchen you can make apple sauce....cut the apples, bake them in the oven with some water and cinnamon, blend the heck of them and then do a little happy dance because apple sauce is awesome and you just made enough to feed a small village for all eternity. 

'

Next I made some potato gnocchi. 

I'm not sure that I'm ready to talk about the gnocchi yet.

We had some issues.

Well actually I don't really think the gnocchi failure was my fault because I got the recipe off of Pinterest and I'm pretty sure that everything on that site has never been tested by anyone BEFORE it's put on the site. I can't tell you how many times I've taken a recipe from there, channeled my inner June Cleaver, only to have everything turn out like something you'd scrape off the floor of Courtney Love's hotel room. Not just bad, but something really horrendously bad! And I'm not usually that bad of cook so ergo, something must be up with Pinterest. 

Anyway, so I made the dough and immediately I thought something has to be wrong because it was way too sticky. The recipe said all you need is mashed potato, flour and egg. There were measurements, I can't remember what they were but I promise you, I followed them. So I keep adding more flour and more flour to try to get it to a proper consistency...in the end I ended up adding nearly an entire bag of flour, killed my back bending over the table trying to roll these tiny balls of hell spawn, downed an entire bottle of wine in the process (ok ok, I probably would have done that anyway) and ended up with sticky potato mess all over my freshly cleaned floor. THEN....yes there's more.....THEN I put half the dough in the freezer because I can't be bothered rolling the damn things anymore, the other half....the half that I've now spent 2 1/2 hours rolling into stupid little useless balls...I put in a container and in the fridge to cook up the next day. The next day, I take out the container and what do I find.....MOLD! Yes, freaking mold all over them! How is that even possible??? They were only in the fridge for 24 hours!

So yeah, that's my gnocchi story. I'm still feeling a bit miffed about that. And I guess this is a To Be Continued story since I still have gnocchi dough in the freezer.....but I'm just not ready to go down that road yet....

Next I made a chick pea stew and that turned out fabulous!

I don't have a recipe because I just threw a bunch of stuff in the pot but here's what I used:

chick peas (duh)

aubergine (or eggplant as us Canadians call them)

red pepper

onion

garlic

tomato

olive oil

tomato paste

chicken stock

cumin

cinnamon

cloves

cardamom

orange juice

That was it. And it was amazing. 

I also made oatmeal banana pancakes, a breakfast recipe I found for Eleni on.....you guessed it, PINTEREST! 

Why do I just keep going back again and again? That site is like an ex-boyfriend....you go back thinking "well maybe this time it's going to work out" only to have everything blow up in your face.

Here's what oatmeal banana pancakes are supposed to look like:

Here's what mine looked like:

But surprisingly, these actually tasted good! Not the burnt ones of course, but the rest were pretty good. I put peanut butter on them and Eleni loved them. I'm not sure I'll be making them again anytime soon because it took all day to get the burnt oatmeal smell out of the house, but anyway they were kind of a success I guess. Here's the recipe:

Ingredients

• 1 cup/80g old-fashioned or quick cooking oats
• 1 banana
• 1 cup/200g cottage cheese
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• ½ teaspoon cinnamon
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 tablespoons milk
• butter for cooking

Instructions

1. Combine all ingredients in a blender and blend until batter is quite runny.
2. Lightly coat a nonstick skillet or griddle with butter and heat over medium low heat.
3. Drop about a tablespoon of batter onto skillet and cook until bubbles appear on top. Flip cakes and cook until golden brown on underside. Wipe skillet clean and repeat with more butter and remaining batter.

I don't know if this is what went wrong but I used Greek yogurt instead of cottage cheese, and olive oil instead of butter....next time I'll use butter but I'll be sticking with the yogurt because it's cheap here (obviously) and you can get it anywhere. I don't think I've even seen cottage cheese in this country. Weird. But I guess why bother when you have so much yogurt hanging around? I don't know. Anyway....

So that's what I've been up to the last few days.

I'll leave you with a little video of Eleni and I playing this afternoon. We had to stop kind of suddenly because...well lets just say she ate a lot of chick pea stew.

Bye!