Recently I went on a mini vaca and had to choose restaurants to eat at for dinner & breakfast. After looking at all the tourist magazines and getting a couple of local recommendations, we went to a very touristy spot for dinner. We were by the water and we ordered a lot of seafood & some hot dogs for the kids (their choosing, not mine)... First up was the mussels and calamari... The mussels tasted bad, terrible actually. The worst mussels I've ever had in my entire life. They weren't gritty- they just tasted horrible. The calamari was very sad, dry... maybe old, but upset me greatly was they served these plump strips that almost looked like clam strips in the calamari basket. ? I kept thinking to myself, what the hell is that? Oh boy, I had ordered a crab cake sandwich and after a very disappointing beginning was expecting the worst & the restaurant delivered. It was a sandwich that if it had crab at all in it, it was so finely shredded that the taste of being fried and the patty itself heavily breaded that that was all I tasted. I made two decisions mid-bite. First, I will not go to a restaurant that I can't smell from the street... When asking for a recommendation for a restaurant I will beg the locals (which I actually ended up doing for breakfast) please, please don't send me to some tourist trap. I don't care where it is, I don't need any gimmicks and even if its a hole in the wall that sells good food, send me there. Please. The second decision I made, although I had been thinking about it before I left, was to begin to elevate my style of cooking. In fact, I really have been doing that slowly... not every day, but more and more meals are beginning to pop up with more elegance... and attention to executing excellence.
If you can believe it, I'm pretty new to grilling... its a task I've long given my husband and have only recently (and I do mean, the last month) started giving it a try. Yesterday I made grilled chicken that was... perfect. The outside was grilled until crispy, the inside was thoroughly cooked but juicy & the marinade came out like a flavor explosion...
I have ambitions to, for the first time ever in my home kitchen, to start making bread from scratch and BY HAND (I have a bread machine I normally use, but I want to start going into artisan bread).
If its not good.... I don't want to eat it OR make it. My quest for executing the perfect dish, whatever it may be has always been... Except right now, I'm really fine tuning it. I want to explore countries cuisines that I had before stayed away from (for example, French food). And again, if it's not exceptional- I don't want to make it.
I have small children. I realize that every meal isn't going to be this way... but darned if I'm not going to try.
