Seafood Chowder

We've been digging through our pictures and realized that we had a number of cooking attempts that we had forgotten about. The first of these was our attempt at making seafood chowder. After picking a relatively basic recipe, we set out to go to Carrefour (the local grocery store in Toulouse) to hunt down the ingredients. Using our basic knowledge of the French language we managed to scrape together most of the ingredients (crossing our fingers for some of the items that we had bought hoping they were the right ones).

Another note, we must apologize for the quality of the pictures the lighting was not the greatest and we had the bare minimum of equipment in the kitchen!!

Ingredients
A few strips of bacon cut up
1-2 Tablespoons of Butter
2 Large Onions
Seafood (shrimp, mussels, small scallops, unknown fish (make sure to pick a firm one))
2-3 Large Potatoes
1/4 Cup Flour
1 Teaspoon Thyme
4 Cups Half-Half
Salt and Pepper to taste
Fresh Thyme

Steps
1. In a large pot fry the bacon
2. Mix in the butter and onions till soft
3. Add 2-3 cups of seafood stock
4. Mix in flour slowly
5. Add potatoes, thyme and salt and pepper. Cook till potatoes are soft
6. Add seafood and simmer for 10 minutes
7. Mix in the cream and heat (don't boil)
8. Enjoy!

This was based off a recipe we found on the internet but we were forced to make a few adjustments with the ingredients we could find.

Seafood Chowder

Verdict:
A simple recipe that turned out great! Not much more to say!!

Pan Fried Steak with Mashed Potatoes

In addition to going out for food, we also enjoy attempting to make our own food! In Toulouse, we decided to begin our foray into cooking our own meals outside of something microwaved or reheated. As a side note, one must be warned that our kitchen equipment was severely limited as we couldn't just go out and rebuy all the kitchen tools we have at home in Canada! Basically all we had to work with was a single pan, one pot and two electric burners.

The first question we asked ourselves after deciding that we wanted steak was - how will we do this without a grill or an oven? After some research we realized that we could do this with a pan, but we were worried that the electric burner would not reach high enough temperatures to seal in the juices of the steak. However, despite our concerns we decided to go ahead and we bought two entrecotes and began our preparations.

We began by leaving the steaks at room temperature for around 45 minutes so that they would cook better, and then following a quick marinate of salt and pepper, the steaks were lightly brushed with olive oil to prevent sticking on the pan. After heating the pan on maximum temperature on the small burner, we crossed our fingers and hoped that the electric burner and cheap pan would cook our steaks properly.

After quickly cooking the steaks for no more than a minute on each side, we took them off and let them sit to allow the juices to settle. To our surprise, the steaks almost looked like they had been cooked on a grill - just without the grill marks. We quickly finished off our steaks with a quick deglazing of the pan using a red wine and then we topped our steaks off with the sauce from the deglazing as well as some mushrooms. Y served her mashed potatoes beside the steaks and we were in business!

Our meal!

Verdict:
After cooking our simple, yet delicious meal we decided that cooking steak at home is something that people do not enough! Other than cooking the mashed potatoes and letting the steaks sit at room temperature, the entire time it took to marinate and cook the steak, the mushrooms and the sauce was under 10 minutes.