Sunday, February 21, 2010

Holy cow, it’s been three days since my last (and first) entry.  I’m going to have to get my act together if I’m going to make this blog relevant and timely.  Served a new menu item this morning, it’s a hybrid between what some of you may have had, my Egg Tartlet and my good friend Lisa’s Egg Cup.  For Christmas, Lisa, formerly from the Ugly Duckling,  gave me a cook book of her recipes and I noticed the similarities between my Tartlet and her Cup, so I decided to blend them.  Of course her recipe called for some chili sauce.  I’ve had a bottle in my pantry for a year, my neighbor Eleanor gave me a bag of Heinz products for shoveling her sidewalk last  year and there was a bottle of chili sauce in it.  I never use chili sauce, so last summer I cleaned out my pantry and donated that and other items to a food drive.  Of course I forgot and assumed it was there.  So after having dinner at the Monterey Pub(  www.montereypub.com ) with friends Carlton & Tim, I went to the grocery store at 11 p.m to get the chili sauce.  I’m very happy with the blended recipe.  I added potatoes O Brian and reduced the amount of egg (cholesterol)  and my recipe was very time sensitive, this new one is more tolerant.    For anyone that’s interested, Lisa is now doing cooking classes and catering out of her new venture, The Fabled Table ( www.fabledtable.com ).

I put the inserts in 500 of my brochures to give to Visit Pittsburgh, ( www.visitpittsburgh.com ) to place in their Welcome Centers.  While Downtown, I stopped at The Terrace Room, ( www.omnihotels.com/findahotel/pittsburghwilliampenn/dining/aspx) a restaurant in the Omni William Penn where I worked for about five years.  It was nice seeing Marty and Santiago again.  Lunch was very good, by the way.

Another project I have been working on is collecting all my entree recipes and quick bread recipes.  I had misplaced my cinnamon bread recipe and thought I lost it.  (I eventually found it).  And that had me bothered.  Lisa kind of motivated me to add my recipes to her book.  AND I think I am going to finally get back to writing my book (45k words in the manuscript, 10k in other areas of my computer ready to be imported to the manuscript and the recipes will be another 5k; so that leaves me with about 15k I need to do before getting someone to edit my ramblings so they make sense to a potential publisher).  I have finished the entrees and only have three more breads to do this afternoon and that project will be finished.

Even though it’s kind of rough on the old bank account, being slow does have some advantages.   🙂