First meal

There is still got a lot of small items to finish, but we've got a working kitchen again! With the tile backsplash and floor done, we can actually cook in our kitchen. Having the refrigerator out in the garage is getting old, but it works.

The first meal we prepared was garlic scallops, saffron rice and roasted asparagus. The cooktop and oven worked great, but our old rice cooker flaked out on us and ruined the rice. I was very annoyed at wasting that saffron. Fortunately we still had one of those microwavable chicken flavored rice pouches from cooking in the bonus room, so we had a substitute that we could heat up quickly before the rest of the meal cooled off.

We've also made steak fajitas one evening. On Saturday, it was shrimp and sausage gumbo with brown basmati rice (in a sauce pan - haven't taken any time to look into the rice cooker's problems yet). I know basmati is not traditional with gumbo, but then again we used turkey kielbasa instead of andouille sausage and replaced half of the butter in the roux with olive oil. Used paprika and cumin to bring some smokiness that we lost by not using andouille. It tasted great.