Siestas and Cupcakes: Revelation

I haven't been blogging since the Superbowl - so YAY SAINTS! We watched the game at a friend's house, so my husband put a limit on how much I could make. I didn't even take photos I'm sorry to say. I made a buffalo chicken dip - recipe here. (Highly recommended!) And then I made a fellow blogger recipe, Spicy Sweet Pretzel Party Mix, recipe and blog here. (Also really good, it didn't even make it to the party!)

My dip, as good as it was, barely got touched. Why, you demand to know? I'll tell you! Little did I know, these folks were cooking! I mean, cooking! Down home hispanic food. Had I known this friends, see, I would have made brownies as I originally wanted. Hubby put the kabosh on the brownies because of my weight loss endeavors, which is noble, but really. The Superbowl is kin to Thanksgiving. How do you not have dessert, which is, you know, my favorite thing to make anyway?

Hubs, he really loves that Hispanic cooking. Also West Indian type food. His mom gave me a cookbook of Haitian food, of which I haven't attempted yet. At the Superbowl I was really thinking, I need to learn to cook like this. Another type of cooking I've been longing to learn is Italian, real honest to goodness Italian cooking, and I've been having great fun looking at blogs people have started based of their ancestors' authentic recipes.

Here's 3 to check out: Aglio, Olio, and Peperoncino, Chef Chuck's Cucina and My Italian Grandmother.

Then today I had a startling revelation. Why in the world am I trying to cook like everyone else? I do have my own heritage, which does include some great recipes, which I do just so happen to be in possession of. Tonight, armed with a glass of zinfandel, I made Golumpki from a recipe I found in my Gramp's collection (Who is Polish by the way). He must have wrote the recipe for himself and not novices such as myself, because some steps were not given. I'm going to play around with the recipe a bit before posting. Here's a picture of dinner:

It tasted really good but I need to tweak it a little. Every Tuesday is like Top Chef for me. Hubs works at 6pm, so I have to have dinner ready by 5:30 at the latest. I usually don't plan ahead and at 4:30 find myself flying out of my seat, inevitably I am sitting, and rush to the fridge to see what I can throw together. It must be plated in 1 hour max - a quickfire challenge! I would fail on Top Chef miserably, not to mention the fact that I fail hubs continuously, because this time limit doesn't turn out too well for me. Tonight's dinner? Ready at 5:50, and there we have it, one lonely Polish dinner.

I mean, sorry Onyx, a lonely dinner with just me and my drooling stinky butt pup.