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fails to plan

I am back to not knowing exactly how to plan so we have enough healthy food for all of our meals for the week.

I started with meal -planning myself. This left me with way too much or too little food, leftovers that were too repetitive... With two people it is hard to cook four meals in a week. You will end up with way too many leftovers unless you do some major recipe-halving magic. If you cook two or three meals a week and try to eat leftovers, trust me, you will want something else by the time Thursday and Friday roll around.

I thought that http://www.thefresh20.com/ was the answer. We tried this for a while. This is a GREAT concept, but the recipes just aren't very tasty. After being burned several times-- buying all of the ingredients and making meals that were just too unappealing to eat--we ended up eating canned spaghetti sauce on pasta or going out for fast food more nights than I would have liked. I think for something like this to work it would have to be a lot more tailored to the preferences of the family (sounds a lot like meal-planning myself).

Lately I have been trying to get back to the gym. Until this week with a nasty cold, I have been pretty good about it, dutifully making the gym my first stop on the way home from work. This leaves me energized and feeling good about myself, but STARVING when I get home at 6 or7 p.m. and in no shape to whip up a home-cooked meal. We fell into our old rut of frozen entrees and eating out, so I tried http://www.myfitfoods.com/. This is a great crutch for weeks when you can't cook. It's pretty tasty, healthy food. It is reasonably priced ($60 bought us a week's worth of healthy dinners for way less than we would have paid eating out), but the food is a little too spicy and a little TOO healthy to be our everyday routine.

Here I am complaining, so let me use this four-step plan from this month's O Magazine:
1. Pushback: Planning myself week after week isn't working, and the easy ways out aren't tailored to our food preferences. They are too overly healthy for us to eat every day. I'm not interested in deprivation--we're not trying to lose weight, just be healthier and eat real food.
2. Possibilities: The most outrageously awesome possibility I can think of is having my own cooking classes (or maybe even a TV show!) for newlyweds and other newly grownups who need to learn to cook healthy everyday comfort food. It would be my full time job to plan out healthy meals, I would become awesome at it, and I would probably have a staff to cook my own recipes for me when I didn't feel like it ;).
3. Preferences: It seems like I prefer having the time to become more awesome at this. And I probably do. I think the secret is concentrating on the time that I WANT to spend cooking (and there is a lot of it) so we'll have something to eat when I DON'T want to cook. It could be a whole new project...
4. Pinpoints: These would be the little ways in which I could make the above happen. I can think of a couple:
a. spend time perfecting a few seasonal meal plans (3 each for winter, spring, summer, fall would cover a whole year!) that cater to our preferences. I could publish these here... maybe with some step-by-step instructions for basic techniques. The best way to learn to cook is to COOK! I have learned so much through Abby/Betty and this would be a good new project.
b. spend time when I do have time to cook making some easy, frozen, heat-uppable healthy meals for us. I like an idea from this month's issue of Martha Stewart Living (not yet available online that I can find) for making TV dinners to freeze--salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, spinach, berry crisp. This is exactly what I'm talking about when I say healthy comfort food. It's healthy enough (carrots, spinach) but comfort-foodie enough (because this girl grew up on meat and taters and I'll never feel satisfied by a diet of all steamed veggies and quinoa!!)

New project in the works for Abby?? Maybe...

took lemons and made lemon squares

On my pre-Christmas trip to H-E-B, life gave me lemons. I needed one lemon for the lemon sage chicken, but I had to buy a bag of about 15 organic lemons because that was the only thing they had left. Mom gave me a Martha Stewart cookies calendar that came with 12 cookie recipes for Christmas--one of which was for lemon squares, so I made them tonight. I have a killer cold and can't smell at all, so I also pretty much can't taste... I'm pretty sure these are some REALLY lemony lemon squares, but I'll get back to you when I have a fully functioning upper respiratory tract :).

de-Christmases the apartment

I pretty much hate Christmas. I guess I would rather embrace the little things than be forced into mandatory fun, pressure to cook and decorate, and present-purchasing. I do enjoy the family time involved though, and had a great Christmas this year. Still, I was anxious to de-Christmas the apartment ASAP.

I took apart our pretty flower arrangement, took out all the red flowers and Christmas tree boughs, and re-assembled it. I took down all the Christmas decorations and put up some pretty new non-holiday ones. All this was fueled by a homemade whole-wheat bagel that I baked yesterday...

Also included in pictures today-- The slice I acquired when prepping lemon slices for my lemon-sage chicken yesterday. Woops!!

our first Christmas dinner

Lemon sage chicken, sweet potatoes, onion rings, and table settings from Crate and Barrel and Williams-Sonoma :).

Thumb print cookies

I was trying to make linzer cookies but something went so wrong with this dough recipe from The Silver Palate. I improvised and made drop cookies with thumb prints filled with raspberry jam :).

Even Julia Child Ruins Dinner Sometimes :)

I am reading "The Kitchen Counter Cooking School" by Kathleen Flinn (who also wrote "The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry" which I just read). I came across this quote today, which I think warrants a post. Kathleen Flinn is a Cordon Bleu Paris trained chef. Her first book is about her time in Paris, and her second book is about her time teaching 9 women how to cook. In this quote, she is speaking to Donna, an otherwise confident newlywed who is reduced to a shaky mess when cooking for company:

"'Hey, I screw things up and I went to culinary school,' I said, approaching her. I gave her a quick hug around the shoulder. 'I burned toast this morning. I overcooked a steak the other night. I mean, it happens. Even Julia Child screwed up sauces and dropped potatoes, right on TV.'"

I have to say, the frequency of complete failure for me has actually increased as I have learned to cook. As I start to try ingredients that I have never worked with and more complicated recipes, I occasionally make something that leads to a string of cuss words, an incoming rescue by my wonderful dish-washing husband, and a pot of boiled spaghetti with a jar of Newman's Own for dinner.

Throughout my experience with learning how to cook, my mom (also a Cordon Bleu trained chef) has been a great help. She is a 24-hour cooking advice hotline and has helped me avert many a disaster (what can I substitute? why is this burning? will this recipe work??). Even when dinner is already ruined and there isn't any advice left to give, she tells me what Kathleen told Donna. Even the best cooks in the world still screw it up sometimes. This is classic mom advice, but also means a lot coming from a trained chef.

And here I go getting all sentimental. This is a big part of what cooking does for me. Even when I first started I noticed this. It is so therapeutic to have a domain in life where it is okay to screw up. Where even a total failure isn't a huge disaster. Having spent so much of my life in competitive school and work environments, with constant worry and stress about whether my efforts would get me to the next level, it is so heavenly to have one thing where I can take risks and fully enjoy my successes and happily learn from my mistakes. This is a lesson that I have carried over into other parts of my life and I hope to continue to do so. But it will always be one of the things that has me utterly addicted to cooking.

Ribeyes, veggies, and couscous!

I surprised myself with this one! This steak is actually really good! I made some extra and it will go into a steak salad later this week. These veggies are delicious, too, because I cooked fresh carrots and zucchini in the juice from the steak in the pan. I added frozen steam-in-the-bag green beans and salt and pepper. It's funny to think that so many people are eating this tonight, because it is the Fresh 20 meal for tonight!

A fondant gift ribbon

Because who knows when you might need one?

It's so easy when you know what you're doooo-in'...

It's so easy when you know hooo-ooow.

Today I signed up for The Fresh 20. It was $50 for a year of:

-seasonal grocery lists (with like, 20 Fresh items! get it??)

-recipes for 5 meals per week

-prep instructions to get ready ahead of time for quick weeknight cooking

I think they're really onto something... If the recipes are good, that is. I like their idea because: 1. It's only 5 meals per week, leaving time for leftovers, other meals made on a whim, and eating out without wasting food. 2. As I have discussed before, most of the work of providing healthy food goes into the planning!

At the very least it's a year's worth of recipes... 250 things that I get to learn how to make!

Real Food

I want to work my way toward this: http://www.100daysofrealfood.com/.

I am inspired by this quote from "Cooking for Geeks":

Michael Pollan wrote in the New York Times (“Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” August 2, 2009): I asked [food-marketing researcher Harry Balzer] how, in an ideal world, Americans might begin to undo the damage that the modern diet of industrial preparedfood has done to our health. “Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. It’s short and it’s simple. Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want—just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.”

So many Americans aren't able to achieve this because they never learned the skills and in the midst of their busy lives, they do not have the time to go back and change the way they get their food.

My long-term goal is to (almost) never eat anything that we do not cook ourselves. There are a lot of skills that I am working to develop to make this happen-- time management, planning, cooking, and maybe even delegation to my sweet husband.

But, baby steps, right? A while back I started making sure that we bought at least three types of fruit per week and made a point to eat them before they went bad. This week, to work toward healthier, more "real" food, I'm going to add a vegetable to each of our meals-- mainly by purchasing plain frozen veggies that will be easy to prepare.

Wilton Flowers and Cake Design Graduation!

Today's project: layered cake with basket weave on the sides, rope on the top, and royal icing daffodils, violets and leaves. :)

Shane wants to bring it to work, but I'm not so sure it's first-impression-of-my-wife's-baked-goods worthy. Especially because Shane's next shift at the hospital is Saturday, so this will be positively leftovers by then!

The Wilton buttercream is more of a lookin' icing than an eatin' icing, although the cake inside is a grade A yellow cake made from scratch. After these classes are over I'm on the search for the perfect buttercream recipe that's yummy and will also hold up under decorating pressure.

Birthday Cupcakes!!

Birthday bouquet for April and dinosaur sprinkles for Shane. Both are Martha Stewart Raspberry Cupcakes (white cake with delicious fresh raspberries mixed in) with very simple cream cheese frosting --2 cups powdered sugar and 2 8 oz. packages of cream cheese. (FYI don't try to make the frosting that Martha Stewart pairs with these cupcakes if you are a beginner. It is a difficult recipe!) I iced them with the cake icer tip from Wilton. The flowers are made from royal icing and I made them today in my flowers and cake design class. Enjoy with your eyes! Also making a cameo in these photos is my cupcake packaging, the cardboard cupcake box with a "from the kitchen of" sticker from Tiny Prints.

5 fish recipes every cook should know!!

3 and a half hours of learning to buy and cook fish. Let's do this!!

Legos and Bagels :)

Shane has been studying all the time lately, so today we decided to de-stress with some Legos. We made this house, complete with lawnmower, basketball goal, and apple tree in the yard. And this evening I made some bagels for Sunday morning breakfast :). I also made pizza today. I made the dough, used H-E-B canned pizza sauce, and we topped them with mozzarella and black olives. I thought it was disgusting, but Shane liked it. Notice a pattern here?? :)

Final Cake!!

Today, I graduated from Wilton Cake Decorating Basics. I even got a diploma! Here is my final cake. What do you think, should I open up Fluff's Cakes after September first, when the Baker's Bill makes it legal to sell homemade cakes? After I take Flowers and Cake Design and Fondant and Gum Paste classes, natch.

Pretzels!

OMG these pretzels were soo good! (I made them last night and I am already referring to them in the past tense because they are GONE.) I used the pretzel recipe from Joy of Cooking.

This week I totally lost my motivation to cook actual food. I am pretty sure this happens to everyone, so I'm trying not to stress that my cute little weekly meal plan complete with grocery list did not turn out the way I planned. I think even the best cooks should reserve the right to call "get your own" night. I did manage to get through the week with at least something on the table each night... My laziness led me to make a lot of eggs/breakfast for dinner and I ended up discovering that delicious hash browns are easy to make!

I also have a cake-in-progress. I am trying to use my cake for Wilton class for a party that we are having tomorrow for a friend's fiance who just moved to Houston AND finished the Bar Exam. We are making cakes decorated with roses tonight in class, so I made a yellow cake and iced it Tiffany-blue-ish and I'm planning to decorate it with some white roses. If that fails, I have a back up plan (cupcakes :)! Unfortunately, even if my cake does turn out it looks like the sky is supposed to fall here tomorrow because of Tropical Storm Don, so our party might be cancelled. In that case, maybe I'll use my renewed cooking energy to make that pizza I've been promising Shane :).

Cupcakes!!!

These are my cupcakes from Wilton class. We did some with "roses" on top and some with "shaggy mums." They are white cupcakes with white chocolate ganache filling. Yumm... :)

Tonight's Menu/Future Plans

On the menu for supper:

South Carolina pulled pork on a homemade bun with tangy cole slaw (from Joy of Cooking... I lost Nanny's recipe!). The pork is browned and in the Crock Pot, hoping to avoid Crock-Pot-grey color and taste. The Crock Pot is ON and PLUGGED IN!! Last night I redeemed myself with Alfredo sauce for our poor, lonely pasta.

Next Project:

Bread!! Pizza dough, sandwich bread, croissants, etc. Shane saw a pizza dough recipe in Joy of Cooking when I was reading last night and he wants to make Hawaiian pizza tonight, so we'll try that first. Joy of Cooking has so many awesome bread recipes and advice!

Flunk!!!

Woke up this morning planning on turning off the Crock Pot and storing my dinner for tonight (italian sausage and tomato ragu). The food that I slaved over last night at nearly midnight, browning the sausage and the vegetables and simmering the sauce on the stove. Carefully placing them in the Crock Pot and setting my oven timer for 8 hours... Fell asleep last night thinking yes, I turned it on, that would be so silly if I didn't turn it on! And now I am looking at my poor, sad, Crock Pot. Full of delicious RAW ragu. Poor, sad little plug hanging off the side of the counter but nooot quiiite in the socket. I unplugged it last night to move it toward the stove so I could spoon in the huge skillet full of sauce.

Uuuggghh.... Monday isn't starting out my way!!! Lessons learned:

1. When you are extremely sleepy and cooking, check everything twice (even things that seem obvious!) I even had my mise en place because I knew I was sleepy! I didn't forget any ingredients, but now they are all sitting in my kitchen having spent 8 hours in the temperature danger zone.

2. When you pour simmering liquid into the Crock Pot, feeling it to make sure it's warm doesn't work... You gotsta check and make sure it's actually plugged in and on!!

Okay, now laugh away. :)

Plans for the Week

This week is going to be Operation Crock Pot Attempt #2. We didn't run out of food last week, so I succeeded, technically, in meal planning. However, we weren't exactly enjoying what we were eating either. I am blaming my failure on the use of grody recipes from Real Simple. This week I'm going to try to redeem myself with recipes from Art of the Slow Cooker. I am already inclined to trust the author of the cookbook because I have already learned from the book

1. Never use water in a slow cooker recipe. Always use broth, wine, etc. or your food will be bland.

2. Always brown the meat before cooking it in a slow cooker.

Chef Mom has also told me both of these things, so this dude must know what he's talking about.

For tonight, I am going to make meat loaf and potatoes parmesan in two separate slow cookers. For tomorrow, I am going to make sausage and tomato ragu, and for Tuesday, I am going to make pulled-pork sandwiches. This time I am going to use Nanny's cole slaw recipe. Also to go with the pulled pork, I'm going to bake another batch of hamburger buns today. This will be my third time making them. The first time they were too small and tall, the second time they were too flat and big, so I'm hoping this time they will be perfect.

Cupcakin' it...

at Sur la table. Learning to make buttercream with Swiss meringue. Last time I tried it turned into a lumpy mess. Let's hope it works for me after this class!

I also picked up a candy thermometer (for making the meringue), a dough scraper, and a Wilton cake icer tip (a huge flat tip to put icing on the whole cake) with my 10% student discount!

Drumroll Please...

My first cake!!!

The cake was supposed to be blue and the cupcake was supposed to be white... So it looks a little Willy Wonka-ish!! But it's not nearly as terrible as I thought it would be. I may actually get good at this!

Did you ever wonder...

...what 5 pounds of buttercream frosting looks like?? This is about to go on my yellow cake with blackberry filling at Wilton class. (Curious to see how this combo tastes together.) I'll post pics pics if I can bear the shame!

Crock Pot Success... REVOKED!!

Shane and I had to throw out the squash lasagna leftovers. It was tolerable as a first time meal.... Not as leftovers. I have high hopes for next week's recipes!

Also, Shane is eating a pulled pork sandwich for dinner tonight and has already willingly eaten chicken noodle soup this week, so I think I'm still at 2 for 3. (For those of you who don't know, the only way to tell if this polite man likes my food or not is to watch whether or not he eats the leftovers. He will never say bad things about the food, but he will politely decline leftovers.)

Wielding a (Chef's) Knife

My Joy of Cooking wisdom for the day. I've been learning a lot from this calendar! Can't wait for knife skills class tonight. I want to know how to chop my veggies fast and even AND how not to cut myself.

I'm trying mobile blogging for the first time. :)

Operation Crock Pot... Room for Improvement :)

My pulled pork sandwich on a homemade bun today is delicious! The coleslaw recipe that came with it from Real Simple is a flunk. I put the coleslaw on my sandwich Southern style so I could still get my veggies though. I think Real Simple is not my favorite source for recipes... They are great if you want something quick, but if you are willing to put a little more work into the food I think it would taste so much better! So next week I'm going to try some more complicated crock pot recipes from my cookbook: The Art of the Slowcooker in the same style of this week. Recipes Sunday, Monday and Tuesday and leftovers Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. This has worked really well this week! Each dish has made enough leftovers for another dinner and one or two lunches, and since I made 3 things and we're saving them all, we're not eating the same thing day after day or letting any of the veggies go bad before they're cooked. :)

Operation Crock Pot: 2 successes and 1 to go!

I have high hopes for my crock pot meal plan this week!! The first two recipes, while not awesome, have turned out totally edible and leftover-worthy!! We have ample serving-sized leftover containers in the fridge for dinner on Wednesday and Thursday night, as well as a few lunches for the week!

Last night I baked hamburger buns (for the pulled pork sandwiches tomorrow) and cut up carrots, celery, and onion for the crock pot chicken noodle soup. I put the hamburger buns in the freezer last night and this morning I just dumped the chopped veggies and the other ingredients into the crock pot right before work. I came home to our apartment smelling deliciously of chicken soup!!

I learned this today: if you are making chicken noodle soup, use chicken with bones in for more flavor! This recipe called for boneless, skinless chicken thighs, so I used that. Over the course of today (with my chicken noodle soup already happily bubbling in my crock pot) I learned from a good cook and a chef that you either have to use bones in or use chicken broth. This made our soup a little bland, but still yummy!

It's getting to where everything we eat is homemade. That's got to be a diet right? The all-homemade diet? I feel like that would work well to keep everything in moderation: you can only eat what you can make from scratch. I googled all-homemade diet and mainly found posts about pet food... Weird! As for me, I'm cool with eating delicious homemade food while my cats eat their Meow Mix. They seem to like it; they eat a LOT of it!

Recommended Recipe & Meal Planning

First, I want to recommend this recipe. It's the All-Bran Muffins recipe from the box. Before you judge (ew, fiber!) bake these and taste them! They are just sweet enough (sugar could also be replaced with Splenda and still taste yummy) and yes, they do have some healthy fiber! But it's all mixed in with white flour and oil, so I wouldn't consider them a health food exactly. The great thing about these is that they freeze well. This morning, I am baking 24 muffins and they're going to go straight into the freezer when they're cool. I put 2 per baggie, then in the morning or for a snack heat them up for 30 seconds. (Or put them in a lunch box and by lunch time they'll be cool but thawed.)

Prep Time: 20 minutes 
Total Time: 50 minutes 
Servings: 12

Ingredients

• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

• 1/2 cup sugar

• 1 tablespoon baking powder

• 1/4 teaspoon salt

• 2 cups Kellogg's® All-Bran® Original cereal

• 1 1/4 cups fat-free milk

• 1 egg

• 1/4 cup vegetable oil

Directions

1. Stir together flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Set aside.



2. In large mixing bowl, combine KELLOGG'S ALL-BRAN cereal and milk. Let stand about 2 minutes or until cereal softens. Add egg and oil. Beat well. Add flour mixture, stirring only until combined. Portion evenly into twelve 2 1/2-inch muffin pan cups coated with cooking spray.



3. Bake at 400° F about 20 minutes (today they baked for me in about 15 minutes) or until golden brown. Cool 10 minutes. Serve warm.

After these are baked I'm going to the grocery store to prep for my week of meals that I planned out. I decided against the Real Simple meal plan, because it would make too much food and most of the dishes wouldn't keep well as leftovers. So this week I'm going to try out Crock Pot meals, which I figure given their mushy and all-in-one-pot nature will make great leftovers! :)

I'm going to make squash lasagna today, chicken noodle soup tomorrow, and barbeque pork sandwiches Wednesday. Then I'm planning to serve the leftovers in that order: squash lasagna Wednesday, chicken noodle soup Thursday, and barbeque pork sandwiches Friday. To prepare, today I am headed to the grocery store to pick up all the ingredients for all three meals, as well as some side dish items (cole slaw and chips for the barbeque pork sandwiches). I'm also going to bake the burger buns today for the barbeque pork sandwiches and put them in the freezer.

I'll let you know if this attempt at a week of meals works! If so, maybe I'll even post the grocery list and recipes together :).

Homework!

This is my homework for Wilton cake decorating class. My school supply kit came with this nifty plastic thing with a stack of icing pattern flash cards. This one had stars on it that I iced over :). Now I'm waiting for the icing to set so we can scrape it off and eat it, hehe.

About Wilton class: I think it's going to be really fun getting to know the people in the class. There are a couple of other newlywed girls who are trying to learn to be more domestic like me, and there are a couple of parent/child pairs in the class.

The first class was a little disappointing because we went over step by step how to bake a cake ...from a mix... Yawn! A lot of the people in the class have no experience with baking. The teacher said that good taste and prettiness are mutually exclusive in cakes. This is not true. So clearly I tuned out the baking advice! For the first class we were supposed to bring plain cookies and I brought homemade ones and it made a stir! So for the week we bring cupcakes (since I love baking and can't imagine buying my baked goods to decorate) I agreed to bring enough cupcakes for me and the two newlywed girls and I made some friends. :)

I can't wait to show you my projects as I progress through the class! My cookies were too ugly to share, but I'll get better!

Homemaking 201: Intermediate Domestic Skills

I'm back!

Fact: Planning a wedding is more work than you think. Unless you've planned a wedding, in which case you know what I mean, girl!?!

Fact: When your husband is in nursing school you have a LOT of extra time!

Therefore: I am a girl with one BIG PROJECT done and ready to take on another adventure!

I have come to the following conclusion about learning to cook: It happens in phases. I started out a little over a year ago afraid of the kitchen... Even a simple chocolate mousse was a project for me, involving its own trip to the grocery store and intense concentration! The thought of that now is so silly! Item by item I am starting to understand why Mom says "Why would you buy that? It's so easy to cook!"

I am in a completely different place now than I was when I started. I am now pretty comfortable in the kitchen. I would by no means say I'm highly-skilled, and I still cut myself, burn myself, burn the foods, and make something straight up nasty on a pretty regular basis!! Although I have learned that some of these kitchen mishaps keep happening even when you are a trained chef, and that I can make good things most of the time!!

Shane and I have gone a while without a fully store-bought, packaged meal. Even if it's just something simple and partially packaged (like tonight: fettucini alfredo and a Central Market salad kit) we have been eating so much better! Oh yeah, and listen to that--fettucini alfredo is now "simple" to me (warm butter and cream over low heat, add parmesan, salt and pepper and stir until cheese is melted) and I tend to keep the ingredients around (whole wheat pasta, whipping cream, parmesan cheese, salt and a pepper mill)!!! I never thought I would be saying this!

About the phases: Now that total fear of the kitchen and domestic ineptitude isn't the issue, I am struggling with meal planning. I tend to pick a few recipes and cook them all in the beginning of the week, leaving us out of food by Thursday OR pick a few recipes and wait until Thursday to cook them, leaving us with rotten produce :(. I want to work on this! If it's hard for me now, I will flunk it if we have kids!

Now... What's next for The Blog Formerly Known as Abby/Betty (now know as "Abby Makes a Huge Mess and..." because I do!)?? I'm going to call this phase Homemaking 201: Intermediate Domestic Skills. The curriculum is as follows:

1. Wilton cake decorating classes!! Not exactly cooking, I know, but I am having to bake my unadorned cookies, cupcakes, and cakes to bring to class!! My kids are going to have awesome birthday cakes like I did.

2. Central Market cooking classes!! In which I will: address my fear of cooking fish, learn knife skills, and learn about grilling, among other things :)

3. Work on weekly meal planning. I am considering trying this four week recipe plan from Real Simple. The convenience of it is really appealing, and they have one that was published in October as well as the one in the link, which seems a little more summery. The drawbacks are the amount of food (I would have to half the recipes/not make them all/make sure it all made good lunch leftovers... which would undo some of the convenience) and some of the ingredients are scary! I have NEVER cooked fish (outside of the frozen fried filets from the Gorton's fisherman) and I am terrified of shrimp because it once gave me awful food poisoning! Thoughts??

I've got my work (fun!!) cut out for me! :D

Yum Yum Down-Home Cookin': Thyme-Baked Chicken and Blueberry Pie

This evening, I decided to make Betty's Thyme-Baked Chicken and Bear Grylls Blueberry Pie recipe from People Magazine. Both were absolutely delicious and simple.

Thyme-Baked Chicken: Instead of using a whole chicken as advised in the recipe, I used drumsticks per Chef Linda's advice. I baked the chicken 15 minutes at 375, then added a TON of cut up veggies. It kind of took forever to cut up the three baking potatoes, 6 carrots, 4 celery stalks, and 2 onions that went into the recipe. I would like to thank onions for already being partially cut up. I would never make it through cutting up an onion if it weren't for that! They make my eyes water like a b!^%&! Over the top of the chicken and veggies, I drizzled 3 tablespoons of melted butter mixed with a teaspoon of thyme. It turned out soo delicious. Not too dry, like I thought it might be, and it had a good buttery flavor, not too herby.

This recipe said it would make 6 servings but it made way more than that! I had a ton left over to freeze. Freezing works out better for me than putting the leftovers in the refrigerator, because then even if we plan on eating the leftovers that week, they are not wasted if we don't finish them all! Plus then you can have a delicious meal that you slaved over on a day when you just chilled out :).

Bear Grylls Blueberry Pie: I subscribe to People (a weekly guilty pleasure :) and every week they publish a couple of "celebrity" recipes. Usually I don't trust them... I mean who would trust Paris Hilton when wondering how to make lasagna? But this week in addition to Paris Hilton (who People swears loves to cook...I guess she might??) lasagna, there was a recipe for Bear Grylls Blueberry Pie. If you haven't heard of Bear Grylls, he's the star of Man vs. Wild. A crazy show where he hangs out in the wilderness and drinks cactus water and eats owl poop and stuff. He says he craves blueberry pie when he returns from his adventures, and the recipe looked simple enough, so I tried it! I also thought it went great with our all-American chicken dinner.

I mixed 6 (yes, six!) cups of frozen blueberries with a cup of sugar, 1/4 cup of brown sugar, 1/3 cup of quick-cooking tapioca, a tablespoon of lemon juice and a teaspoon of cinnamon. I mixed that up and poured it into a pie crust, affixed another pie crust on top (forgot to add the butter before I did that!) added sugar to the top of the crust, and baked it covered with tin foil for about 40 minutes, then about 10 more minutes uncovered to make the crust GBD (golden brown delicious :). We let it cool for an unreasonably short amount of time then ate about a fourth of it. It's soo good! I think the butter would have made it too rich. Next time I think I could make the pie crust. I feel better when I know what's in things...

It's been forever, but I've been cooking!

Okay, I know its been FOREVER since my last post, but I started to get bored with the routine of cook, photograph, blog, repeat. And as I got more accustomed to cooking, it became less of an event, and I started to forget to photograph my creations pretty regularly. Or if they were particularly delicious, we ate them before there was anything left to photograph! Now I return with three reasons I LOVE cooking!

1. The more you do it, the cheaper/easier it gets! When you start cooking, each trip to the grocery store is a huge ordeal. You don't know where to find anything, and your grocery bill ends up being three times higher than usual because of the spices and kitchen utensils that you have to buy. Trips to the grocery store are an adventure, but an adventure isn't really what you're looking for when you just need dinner on the table in the middle of a work week! This has stopped happening for us. Our grocery bill has fallen back to what it was before, when we ate all processed ready-made food. When I go to the grocery store now, I usually just need to get the perishable items (produce) and special items (cuts of meat, types of pasta) that are needed for the recipe. For baking, we barely need to buy anything. I keep canisters of flour, sugar, and salt on the counter now, we keep eggs, butter, crisco, and vegetable oil on hand, and I even have meringue powder, unsweetened chocolate, and cocoa powder in the cabinet. This weekend I made mini-Bundt cream cheese brownies before our weekly trip to the grocery store!

2. That magical "ccchhhsssssssss" sound. I LOVE this sound. The sound it makes when you drop onions and bell peppers into vegetable oil warmed over medium heat. The sound it makes when you pour the sauce into pad thai or the chicken broth into a skillet of risotto-in-the-making. I hear it, and the stress of my day disappears. I really don't know what else to say about it. I just love that sound!

3. It makes me feel healthy and good. Although you don't notice this while it is happening, eating processed food all the time makes you feel like shit. When you start eating meals where you know exactly what went into them, it changes the way you eat. It changes the amount that you eat (for example, you may stop short of a bowl of something you now know was made with heavy cream). I changes WHAT you eat. If you are making homemade food, the chances that you will eat pizza or spaghetti every night are slim. Both of those are pretty labor-intensive compared to what I usually make. My stomach thanks me. I also feel good about feeding my fiance. Left to his own devices, he will survive on Chef Boyardee and frozen pizza. He doesn't mind it, but I would much rather provide him meals that include more of the food groups!

In short, I heart cooking. There is something magic about it. Something about putting work into something that will nourish your body and taste good, but also something that will not end the world if you don't do a good job of it. It's not like college transcripts, your resume, or the MCAT. The results do not go on your permanent record. You either end up with a recipe you want to repeat, or it ends up in the trash and it's forgotten about tomorrow. I never thought this would happen, but I guess I inherited it from Chef Momma!