Hello Everyone:

I hope you are all enjoying a lovely Sunday. It is beautiful outside. Once I am done with this post, I’ll be heading outside to enjoy the beautiful day. (Does anyone else ever have a problem typing in the sun?? I cannot do it! I can hardly see the screen.)

This week was soo busy! For lunch most days I enjoyed a turkey wrap with dijon, hummus and spinach:

This was a great wrap. Usually I would have a greek yogurt a couple of hours after lunch, too.

I had some fantastic dinners this week! I definitely felt like I was eating rather extravagantly this week – and I decided to just embrace that fact 🙂 On Thursday night I went to the North End with seven of my friends. What a great night we had! We walked around for a little over an hour before dinner – we had 7 o’clock reservations. It was a beautiful day, weather wise which made us all so happy. I loved going into the local North End markets, looking at all of the different ingredients they carried – great breads, fresh pastas, sauces, tomato pastes, and spices and of course great coffees. What fun!

I have gone to the North End several times, and I always order something out of the ordinary and it is always lovely. However on Thursday I was really in the mood for something traditional. I had never gone to the North End and ordered something ‘classic’. On Thursday night, I surprised myself by ordering a simple penne bolognese.

I was so excited for this dish. It totally reminded me of my childhood. My mom and dad’s tomato meat sauce (as I used to call it growing up) was probably my favorite dinners. This one was pretty darned good, too:

I have to tell you guys something…. It’s rather embarrassing. But I am embracing it. I ate everything on this plate:

Seriously. So. Good.

The next night, I was on for making dinner. I had promised M a dinner from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Last year I received this book as a gift when the movie Julie & Julia came out, friends went to see the movie and decided that I needed a copy of the cookbook since I was already a serious food blogger. It was the best gift for me! I was soo excited to have this book in my collection. I love the recipes. Friday I had planned to make Suprêmes de Volaille aux Champignons (Chicken breasts with Mushrooms and Cream).

Normally I have a problem with recipes that call for a lot of butter, cream, and so on. But I figured if I am making a recipe from MTAFC I have to follow the recipe. It is going to be rich, but it is also going to be wonderful. I had to do the recipe justice, at least the first time I am doing the recipe. So, bring on the butter and cream!

The prep work:

Shallots and mushrooms. I love mincing shallots 🙂 Oh, I did use more mushrooms than the recipe called for, because I love mushrooms. I weighed the mushrooms at the store, and it was just under a pound. I used just over half of the mushrooms, but after stemming them, I am not sure how much they weighed. I can’t find my food scale anywhere. Meh.

Butter, shallots, mushrooms:

I don’t know what smells better than mushrooms cooking in butter. Divine.

Making the cream sauce – adding the beef stock. This brings us to the one change I had to make to the recipe. It called for 1/4 cup of dry white wine, and I did not have any in the house. So I added a bit more beef stock. 😦 Next time I will have the wine!! I am sure it would totally change the taste of the sauce.

Stock added. Then I put the camera down and really got to work. Once I added the cream, I was a bit nervous to put the whisk down to snap a photo… But here is the final product:

I had a rather small serving of the dish, since it is so rich. But it was wonderful, too! I cannot wait to make this again. It really was not all that hard to make, which was a nice surprise. I will be cooking from MTAFC again soon – so stay tuned.

That about wraps up my amazing meals of this past week.

Now I have to come up with a meal plan for this week – how will it ever compare? 🙂