We Love to Cook!

I know I should be blogging about how we've settled into our house and daily life as a married couple but first I wanted to share with you what we did this past weekend. Don't worry, I'll get to that soon enough. This past weekend, Jonathan and I along with our friend Colleen cooked 4 meals for about 20 people over Friday and Saturday. We all have a pretty big passion for cooking and I especially love cooking for other people. We were cooks for a retreat called Bayou Awakening which is a Catholic retreat for young adults. If you're interested check it out here: http://www.archgh.org/youngacm/Awakening/. This retreat is held twice a year: once in the fall and once in the spring. So anyways, I was asked to cook for this retreat and I asked Jonathan and Colleen to do it with me and they were crazy enough to accept! We decided to go international for the weekend and we made food from all different countries. Friday night we went English and made shepherd's pie and a traditional English trifle for dessert. Saturday morning was Mexican which meant migas and freshly made corn tortillas! Lunch was entirely Asian and we had homemade egg rolls, egg drop soup, and Thai peanut chicken. For dessert we went Italian and made pistachio and chocolate hazelnut gelato ourselves. I know, we're kind of a big deal.... Just to throw in a few more cultures, for snacks we had hummus and pita chips as well as challah bread which Colleen made herself! It was sooo yummy and it looked beautiful! And finally, for the grand finale meal we served all Indian food! Freshly made naan, saag paneer, chicken tikka masala, and a vegetable coconut curry. Our last dessert was bread pudding with vanilla ice cream. So amazingly good and we have three quarters of it in our fridge so please help us eat it if you can haha.

We were incredibly exhausted by the end of it but super pumped that we actually did it. We were also lucky to have all Sunday to recuperate. We only were able to take two pictures and that was thanks to Colleen so here they are:

On the left is the Thai peanut chicken and egg rolls with a special dipping sauce for the egg rols.

On the right is the egg drop soup!

Think it looks like takeout?? No way! We made all of it!

We totally made this too! Chocolate hazelnut gelato on the left and pistachio gelato on the right.

With a cookie of course! Just like the Italians do it...(hopefully)

It was a great weekend! Although it made me feel old because it's hard for me to stay up past my bedtime anymore haha. We had a blast in the kitchen, had plenty of dance parties while we cooked, and everyone loved the food! It was definitely a success!

If you're interested in trying to make some of this amazing food here are some of the recipes. It's not as hard as you'd think! We hadn't even made a lot of these recipes until a week before the retreat or even the weekend of. Most of them are really easy!

Shepherd's Pie: http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/easy_shepherds_pie/
Egg Rolls: http://www.joyfulabode.com/2009/07/05/homemade-baked-egg-rolls/
Egg Drop Soup: http://chinesefood.about.com/od/chinesesouprecipes/r/eggdropsoup.htm
Thai Peanut Chicken: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/thai-peanut-chicken/
Pistachio Gelato: http://www.archgh.org/youngacm/Awakening/
Chocolate Hazelnut Gelato: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/chocolate-hazelnut-gelato-recipe/index.html
Naan:  http://budgetbytes.blogspot.com/2010/09/naan-127-recipe-016-serving.html
Saag Paneer: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/absolutely-perfect-palak-paneer/
Bread Pudding: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/the-best-bread-pudding-recipe/index.html

Of course I'm always looking for new ideas of things to cook so if you have any suggestions or favorite recipes feel free to share!

-Chelsey