Cajun cooking, and Ronco loses out…

With lots of unusual things going on this week has started out to be pretty interesting. Kristen and I are planning to purchase a new printer since our current one has bitten the dust, which has allowed me to update my printer knowledge and do a little research. What did I find? Well, the Canon Pixma MP450 seems to be one of the highest rated all-in-one units available for around $150 so that’s what we’ll be purchasing. It’s also compatible with our upcoming Mac purchase, which is also good.
Kristen and I had a fairly adventurous/exploratory weekend. We took a trip to the local library for some cookbooks and a then took a subsequent trip to the grocery store to get some items for preparing a couple of Cajun dishes we found. She spent most of the day yesterday cooking up two gumbos, one seafood (for me) and a chicken for her. They were really good, however a Morracan bread recipe that she tried wasn’t as popular.
One other purchase that we made at the grocery store were some small pots and some herb seeds. We’re going to start an herb garden! It has been something we’ve wanted to do for a while, but we just haven’t ever taken the time. We got them started last night in our kitchen. As part of that purchase we also decided to get a food dehydrator so we can dry any herbs that we can’t use/give away. I’ve been wanting one for a quite some time since watching the Ronco food dehydrator infomercials of yesteryear, so I was pretty excited to pick one out. However, after reviewing some feedback on Amazon.com I found that there was a Ronco competitor that apparently had a better product that, among other features, could dry the food in about half the time of the Ronco machine.
So, now we know that next weekend will be filled with making dried fruit and probably any other item that we can dry and store away will also visit the machine.