I Made a Thing!

I think I accidentally, subconsciously made cooking my hobby. I have really started to enjoy it over the last few years. I've never minded it but now I'm interested in it for more than just the purpose of surviving. My biggest complaint in the past was how long it would take to build a weekly menu, especially if I was trying to watch calories. It would take me hours! Then I stumbled upon a service called PlateJoy. It is not one of those services that sends you food, it just creates menus for you and then auto creates the shopping list too! You can even send the shopping list to Instacart if you use that service. So now, something that used to take me hours, literally takes me 5 mins! The recipes look a complicated at first but once you get into them, they really aren't and I have learned so much from using them over the years!

Which leads me to the real topic of this post... From all my experience, I'm starting to be able to intuit what things go well together instead of needing a recipe. I made my first attempt at completely creating something... and it went great!! Here it is:

It is a little puff pastry appetizer. Well, it is supposed to be but I couldn't find puff pastry in the grocery store so I had to use croissant dough. It was still good but I think the dough was too rich. Apparently puff pastry is in the freezer section and I was looking in the cooler section where you find the canned biscuits, etc. Oh well, that actually sums up cooking pretty well. You have to be able to adapt at any moment!

(Unlike baking... where if you breathe wrong during the process then it ALL FALLS APART. I hate baking. It is stupid. End of story.)

Ingredients:
Puff Pastry (subbed croissant dough)
1 raw jalapeno
Pre-cooked Bacon (real bacon would be better though!)
Brie cheese
Strawberry Jam

Preheat the oven as indicated on the dough package

Dice the jalapeno and the bacon and mix together. Roll out the croissant dough and cut into squares instead of the normal triangles. Place 1 brie triangle in the middle of the dough square and top with about a TBSP of the bacon/jalapeno mix. gather and pinch the dough around the yummy goodness.

Bake 10-12 minutes, until the dough is golden brown

in the meantime, heat the strawberry jam with a little added water to thin it out. After you pull the dough balls out of the oven, then drizzle the heated jam over it. I added a little too much water so mine was way too thin but it still got the flavor in there so look, it's fine!

The process wasn't perfect but these turned out really well so i'm pretty proud for my first attempt! Even though i called them an appetizer, we ended up eating 2 for breakfast the next day so they work well for that too. They are kind of similar to a kolaches if you have ever been to Texas.

So there, ya go! My first recipe! If i can do it, so can you so go create something and let me know how it goes!

// Hack //