Holy Week Food, Monday

I am on vacation this whole week. I mean, I was on vacation last week, but it wasn't the relaxing kind of vacation. This week is. I have left my house to go shopping, go to Church, and...that's about it really. I ran a few errands on with gritted teeth.

Anyway, the point is that I have been cooking. I have quite the plan worked up for the Triduum, but even the beginning of Holy Week has been filled with things I have never cooked before. So here's a few posts about them. I will split this up into as many posts as I feel the need to, because I love taking pictures of food and so there are a lot of pictures!

To start off, though, let me clarify where I am starting from with cooking. I can follow recipes well, but I am not an innovative cooker. If told to make dinner, I will almost always cook spaghetti. My main gap in cooking skills is normal meals that take a reasonable amount of time to make. I can do stupid-easy, and I can do long recipes. I have trouble innovating in the middle.

So anyway, here we go!

On Monday, we had shepherd's pie. Easy and relatively cheap, especially if you do what we did and buy the mixed ground meat instead of pure ground beef. (Is there a downside to doing that?)

I also made Hot Cross Buns, using the recipe from A Continual Feast. Of course, I can't eat them, and I forgot to halve the recipe, so Kevin has an awful lot of hot cross buns to eat! From what I hear, though, he's making good progress on the pile.

As you can see, this was slightly a mixed success. The ones I baked in muffin tins were a little overcooked, although once you get past the shell they are fine inside. I blame the oven for this--I heated it to the right amount, but the buns just cooked too fast. I will admit I was worried about these buns, because using an American recipe with German ingredients and measuring implements is always hard. I had a pyrex container with pints marked on it, and so I used that to estimate all variations of a cup. I used a regular teaspoon for teaspoon measures. It seems to have turned out ok! (Note to self--next time you move to Germany bring a complete set of American measuring implements.)

The more I cook, the more I enjoy it. I am starting to collect recipes I like in a recipe book, and I am excited to find more as I go on!