Sometimes, my experiments fail

For dinner the Friday night of the blizzard, I tried Fettuccine with Prosciutto and Peas. Interestingly, the recipe online calls for 2/3 cup of heavy cream - the recipe in my cookbook only called for 1/4 cup, which was seriously not enough. They keep referring to the "sauce" throughout this recipe, and I'm thinking, "What sauce? This isn't even enough liquid to keep the pasta from sticking together!" So perhaps if you use the larger amount, it will come out better than mine did. Of course, if you read the comments, apparently people had some trouble with the cream curdling when the lemon juice was added. I obviously didn't have this problem, since there was barely any cream in there, but it might be worth it to add the cream at the end like the commenters recommend.

One other quibble I had with this recipe - the pasta shape was inappropriate for the ingredients. Twirling fettuccine around a fork meant the peas kept falling off the fork, and it was virtually impossible to get a bite with all three components of the dish. I ended up alternating between a forkful of pasta and a spoonful of prosciutto and peas. Maybe it would have worked better if there was actually some sauce, but I'd recommend using a shorter shape of pasta with some texture to it, so it clings to the peas more.

Saturday, I made Coconut Shrimp Soup, which also didn't go very well, but that wasn't the recipe's fault. See, I went food shopping on Friday. Day of the blizzard, weekend of the Super Bowl? Yeah, the grocery store was practically out of food, so I ended up having to make some substitutions. They were out of fresh ginger - you wouldn't expect a snowstorm to cause a run on ginger, but there you have it - so I bought this ginger spice blend that was kind of a paste. That worked out fine. But I also couldn't find any coconut milk, and therein lies my downfall. I called my mother in the supermarket and asked if cream of coconut was the same as coconut milk. My mother: "Sure, I guess so." Well, it's not. Cream of coconut is way sweeter, and while that's awesome in a pina colada, it made my soup sickeningly sweet. Fortunately, I had the foresight not to put in all the shrimp - since seafood doesn't usually reheat well, I figured I'd just throw in one serving of shrimp tonight, and then I could add more each time I reheated it. So I didn't waste 1 1/2 lbs of shrimp, thank goodness. And my mother has accepted responsibility for this culinary failure, and has promised to google before advising me in the future.