Recipes 1-4: Extreme Mint

Last night marked the completion of the first 4 recipes on my quest:

Garlic and Sun-dried Tomato Corn Muffins
Artichoke Gratinata
Beef Roast with Spicy Parsley Tomato Sauce

Strawberry and Moscarpone Granita



Overall, I'd say the meal was a success! Except...

1. I don't like sun-dried tomatoes. Ick! For the same reason I don't like raisins, I feel bad for fruits and veggies that have had the life sucked out of them while they sit, helpless in the harshness of the sun. I didn't think it was possible for sun-dried tomatoes to taste like raisins, but they do. Kind of ruined the muffins for me, even when I tried to pick around the tomatoes.
2. Do you know how expensive frozen artichoke hearts are? Yikes! The recipe called for one pound. I found them first in those little boxes for $5.99 for 8 oz!! That would have been $12! Luckily I found some that were already quartered for $3.99 for 12 oz. Much better!
3. Trying to figure out which cut of meat is which is very confusing. It seems like there are 42,000 different names for the same cut! I wound up using a chuck roast which the recipe listed, but it didn't seem like it was the same thing in the picture. Also, I like it when recipes give time and temperature for a cooked piece of meat, but if they're completely conflicting, which one do you go with? I think there's an art to somehow compromising the two. OR...there's an art to learning the exact right spot to stick the meat thermometer! I inserted mine, it looked like the middle...but after just a few minutes, it said it already reach the 140 degrees I was shooting for! Uh-oh! I consulted another cook book which said a roast is usually 160 degrees before it's medium. So, I let it go to 160 degrees, but that was only 20 minutes or so! I wound up messing around with the thermometer and trying again, it went down to 109 degrees and took another 40 minutes or so. That was more like it. The meat was a little tough.
4. EXTREME MINT! Oh my goodness...mint overkill on the granita! Basically, you make a simple syrup with water and sugar and infuse it with mint. It was VERY minty. Then you drizzle the syrup into pureed strawberries with some moscarpone cheese. All I could taste was mintyness. I hoped it would mellow a little by the time it froze. It didn't. It wasn't very good.

The best things about the meal:

1. It wasn't that complicated. Even though I made 4 dishes, it really didn't require too much prep or clean up. Yay!
2. The artichokes were yummy! I mean really, I like artichoke hearts anyway, but sprinkle (or dump) some parmesan cheese on the top and make it all crunchy...and you've got yourself a winner!!
3. The meat, though a bit tough, was actually pretty tasty. The sauce, which you made with a whole bunch of parsley, roasted tomatoes and some other stuff, was not a very appetizing color (imagine what you get when you mix red and green), but it was yummy!
4. The only redeeming quality I can figure out with the dessert was that when I pureed the strawberries all by themselves, they smelled divine!

OK, 4 recipes down...90 something to go!! Stay tuned!!