Maiden Voyage

As neophyte videographers and cooks our maiden voyage didn't go so well.  We did manage to establish the basics. Joy is our producer, makeup artist, director, camera lady, and handler of various other miscellaneous tasks while filming.  Arielle aside from providing recipes for our book/videos is also in charge of graphics and photography.  I, Victoria, also provide recipes, and I am the designated writer for Culinary Misadventures.

I am so happy we decided to call our brand Culinary Misadventures.  The name fits us perfectly.  Our first video session was horrific to say the least.  We decided to start at 8pm and wanted to cook 4 dishes plus some odds and ends.  Our ambitious first menu included my family's Crab Gravy, Boiled Calamari, and Cheese Cake as well as Arielle's family recipes for Seafood Fricasee, Crab Meat and Shrimp Pistolettes, Strawberry Reduction for the cheese cake, and Sangria.  These were the only recipes we have been able to perfect from our stack of handwritten indecipherable family recipes.  The Crab Gravy is a New Orleans style Italian gravy that we serve over pasta but it can also be served over rice.  It's ridiculously spicy (my family used to sit and sweat while they ate it) and takes a while to make.  Also, like most Italian gravies it tastes better the next day.  The Seafood Fricasee is one of Arielle's traditionally Cajun recipes.  It calls for a dark roux which is the most difficult and integral part of the dish.

We decided to cook all these dishes simultaneously.  BIG MISTAKE!  Poor Joy!  She has so much editing to do now!  We also realized we will need to add some notes to the videos before we post them on YouTube.  The mistakes we made will help us for future videos, but these first few are sort of embarrassing! That's ok, we're still learning.  My voice is terrible. 

We used as many local ingredients as possible.  Even the wine was a California wine.  Yes, we do like to buy imported items, but only as specialty items.  Cheese, wine, beer, certain canned goods, etc. are all nice treats!  But we like to buy local for everyday dishes such as these.  Our recipes came out beautifully and they tasted good too! ;)  Look for our videos (soon to come)!

 Crab Meat and Shrimp Pistolettes

 Boiled Calamari

 Crab Gravy

 Cheese Cake

 Strawberry Reduction

Seafood Fricasee

This blog is meant to document our journey through the creation of a cookbook and supplemental videos and gives us an outlet to talk about food in general.