What's cookin'?

I decided to play around in the kitchen during the last two days since the weekend is about the only time when I actually feel up to cooking. I don't have much culinary experience, but I actually think that my lab experience helps out a lot (which is sad beyond words, but hey).

On Saturday, I decided to make crabcakes using canned crabmeat from Trader Joe's. (On my budget, fresh crab is completely out of the question!) The recipe called for breadcrumbs, and since I had a week-old loaf of bread, I decided to make my own... with a cheese grater. About 15 minutes later, I had a 1/2-cup of bread crumbs and a sore arm. The moral of the story: buy breadcrumbs in a can. The crabcakes themselves actually were pretty good (!), and I had two for dinner along with some standard post-grad-budget pasta fare.

Today, I cleared out my camera's memory card and documented the preparation of dinner. The menu included:
1. Roasted bell peppers stuffed with mashed potatoes.
2. Chicken-stuffed croissants.

To make the bell peppers, I mashed my own potatoes. Since I didn't have a masher or electric beater, I used the bottom of a glass. I mixed in some milk, butter, and vegetable bruschetta (thanks, Trader Joe's). I parboiled the peppers for 5 minutes and then stuffed them with the mashed potatoes. To top things off, I added some caramelized onions, roasted bell pepper strips, bread crumbs, and parmesan cheese. Here's the finished product:

One goal of tonight's meal was to use random ingredients that I had left over. I brought home two chicken breasts from work last week, and I also had randomly purchased a can of canned Crescent Rolls (tm) two weeks ago. By searching "croissant chicken recipe," I stumbled upon a recipe that used these two ingredients and, of all things, cream cheese. Strangely, I also happened to buy cream cheese last week without remembering to get bagels. So in many regards, this recipe was perfect. Here's a picture of the croissants before I stuffed them:

And here's the finished product. They basically tasted like Hot Pockets and will make a pretty good lunch tomorrow. (As the above picture suggests, there were indeed 4 of these little guys. I took the next picture after I scarfed one down.)

Well, that was dinner :). I actually enjoyed cooking a lot, so I'm looking forward to trying new things in the next few months. Let me know if you have any suggestions!