Rebecca’s Cooking Journal

I am very lazy on Friday nights. Sometimes it’s Saturday night. Sometimes it’s other nights. Here’s a list of quick and easy meals for such nights.

• Frozen Pizza (required ingredients: a frozen pizza)
• Homemade Pizza (required ingredients: yeast, flour, etc.; cheese and tomato sauce or pesto)
• Pancakes or Waffles (required ingredients: bisquick, milk , butter, syrup and/or peanut butter)
• Cheese sandwhiches or quesadillas (required ingredients: bread or tortillas, cheese. Optional: chicken, avocados, sour cream, tomatoes)
• Pasta with sauce (required ingredient: pasta, preferably the frozen tortellini or ravioli with cheese or chicken; sauce, such as canned alfredo sauce or pesto; alternatively, cream and Parmesan cheese)

What’s your go to lazy meal?  I need more ideas.

I haven’t been posting our weekly menus throughout the last few months, but here’s the listing of some of what we’ve been eating. Some repeats, a few weeks where I didn’t keep track at all, and some new recipes. I’m going to try to be better about variety, full balanced meals, and trying new things in November!

• Grilled grilled chicken quesadillas; lemon spinach
• French Toast
• Macaroni and Cheddar
• (Book club social treats) Congee and Deep-Fried Tarro Root
• Pumpkin Soup
• Kraft Macaroni and Cheddar
• Fetticini Alfredo with Grilled Chicken and Broccoli
• Cheese Pizza
• Carrot Soup
• (company) Ginger Chicken with Almonds; Coconut Rice; Carrots and Ginger; Chocolate Chip Cookies
• French Toast
• Ginger chicken and rice
• Kraft macaroni and cheese dinner
• meatloaf, mashed potatoes, carmelized carrots
• Pasta with Pears, Gorgonzola, and Ham
• Chicken Pot Pie and Buttermilk Biscuits
• Chicken nuggets; potato wedges; green salad with bacon and cranberry vinaigrette
• (company) Baked Chicken with Cheese and Apples; Apple Muffins; Green salad with apple slices
• Chicken quesadillas; smashed potatoes with scallions and bacon; green beans
• Bean soup
• Meatloaf; leftover mashed potatoes; frozen corn
• Onion Tart with mustard and fennel; arugula salad
• (snack) Bacon and cheese pretzel bites
• Mustard Chicken; arugula salad with potato wedges

Despite the lack of posts on this blog, I have been cooking.

I feel I am entering a new stage of cooking. Up until the past few months, I had to research out recipes and cook them. I had to write things down and plan ahead. In the last few weeks, I’ve been finding I’m more neutral to recipes. I read it and figure it out, and then I put it down and go cook the food, sometimes referring to it and sometimes not. It’s like the recipes are suggestions that I like.

I really like this. I want to be more of an “improvisational” cook, but I’ve always been tied to recipes. I’m feeling another wave of  reading cooking memoirs coming on and I’m looking forward to the recipes in them: not because I’m going to go and cook them ingredient by ingredient, but rather because I want to see what they do and how they arrive so I can likewise adapt in my own kitchen.

I have been cooking lots of the old regular recipes, many of which I’ve mentioned on here. If I posted my “what have I been cooking” list, it would look rather boring and repetitive. But there have been some new recipes and there have been some more “experimental” dinners: meals in which I just tried it and it turned out okay.

I don’t think I’m going to stop cooking by recipes anytime soon. Even with a recipe I get overwhelmed sometimes and feel like “it’s just too hard.” But I like where my cooking is going!

In addition to the popovers I raved about the other day, I also tried the Noodle Pudding from Pretend Soup. It was okay. My son loved it and ate it very quickly, but I ate it with a stomach ache. It was like Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinner for me: Eck. I could eat it but it doesn’t feel good in my belly.

I liked the chicken dinner, which was good because there was so much leftover I ate it all week. Got pretty tired of it, to be honest.

I’m going out of town for the coming weekend, so I won’t have another What We Ate until two weeks from now.

Sunday

chicken curry with cashews and rice

Monday

[leftovers]; Popovers (from Pretend Soup) thoughts here

Tuesday

[leftovers]; Noodle Pudding (from Pretend Soup)

Wednesday

[leftovers]

Thursday

carrot soup; cheddar biscuits

Friday

pork chops with parsley butter sauce; mustard potatoes; Zucchini Moons (from Pretend Soup);

Saturday

Macaroni and cheddar

This week I’ve taken the fact that my husband is out of town to my advantage by cooking meals with my son specifically for my son. I have lots more to say about Pretend Soup and how much fun it is to cook with my toddler. I plan on cooking some more of the recipes in the coming week.

I also tried something new that I’ve always wanted to try: meatloaf. It was so good. The recipe I made could use improvement, but considering how easy it was to pull together, I’m eager to add this to repertoire. Making a “new” recipe is a “mini-challenge” for the Spice of Life Challenge I’m hosting, so while I do try to a new recipe once a week anyway, at least this time the new recipe was for something I’d always wanted to try. I’ve had this stereotype of meatloaf as a dry, boring thing. I thought it was moist and tasty.

Sunday

French toast

Monday

Surprise Muffins (from Pretend Soup); Zucchini Moons (from Pretend Soup); peanut butter and jelly

Tuesday

Macaroni and Cheddar

Wednesday

Personal pizzas! (from Pretend Soup)

Thursday

asdf

Friday

parmesan risotto with peas

Saturday

meatloaf; baked herb polenta; vegetables

I realized something this week. When we have company, I make yummy, special meals. When we don’t have company, I made the same things every. single. week. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The regular fare is cheaper in the long run. But I do have to say I like the new meals the best! I really enjoyed Saturday’s dinner, and the rub was so easy, I’ll do it again.

I also am realizing, as I said yesterday, that I need to be more “experimental” in planning my meals. I tend to stay inside the box, unless, as I said, someone special is coming for dinner.

Other than that, I’ve already forgotten what I meal I made on Friday night. It was ordinary and all, I just don’t remember what I did! LOL!

Sunday

Grilled steak with parsley butter; pasta with roasted cherry tomatoes and thyme

Monday

[leftovers]

Tuesday

lunch with family/ [leftovers for dinner]

Wednesday

Chicken Pot Pie Stew and Buttermilk Biscuits

Thursday

[picnic dinner with family]

Friday

I seriously forgot what I made Friday Night. Oops. It was really memorable, apparently.

Saturday

Chimichurri-rub kabobs; arroz con crema; churros

Our dinner guests the other night asked us if we are “experimental cooks.”

“No way!” I immediately responded. I like to cook recipes. I don’t do anything out of the ordinary. Anything I cook will be common. That’s not “experimental.” Experimental would be using odd ingredients and cooking without recipes: just making dishes up.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since.

I realized that every recipe I cooked Saturday night was brand-new to me, including the churros, which had to be fried in oil. I had “experimented” with three new dishes. And I’d only done so because I thought my husband (whom I consider the cook) would be in the kitchen helping me. I probably wouldn’t have attempted new recipes if I knew he was going to be in the basement fixing the water softener, as he was. I would have been afraid to do so, for some reason.

And yet, I was fine. I cooked new recipes by myself and they were delicious and easy. Now I consider them in my repertoire, and cooking them again won’t be a “challenge.”

So I am an “experimental cook” in that I try new recipes that sound good, even if they are new to me. My husband’s encouragement and implicit faith in my cooking helps me to be more experimental.

As I ponder that little bit of experimentalism, the more I think that such willingness to experiment is part of being a cook. In order to improve, I have to try something new. If my baby hadn’t experimented with walking, he would be crawling still.

My hope is that as I become more comfortable experimenting with new recipes, I’ll also become more comfortable experimenting beyond “new recipes” and into the No-Recipe Improvisation that I’m always so impressed with.

Are you an experimental cook? In what ways do you experiment? What are the best techniques for becoming more experimental and less timid about new foods and recipes?

What We Ate (Week ending Aug 1)

This week was full of disasters, except for the luncheon I made for my sister. That turned out okay. But, I burned the macaroni and cheddar under the boiler, the tomato separated from the milk in the soup so it was grainy and gross, and I didn’t cook the onions until they were sweet for the soup, so the crunchy onions ruined the overall flavor of the chicken pot pie stew. Overall, not such a great week. The chicken cordon bleu was okay, but not an all-around winner.

Sunday: [leftovers]

Monday: Birthday luncheon for my sister: chicken fettuccine alfredo; grilled chicken salad with maple vinegar dressing; fresh baked bread via breadmaker

Tuesday: Macaroni and cheddar

Wednesday: [leftovers]

Thursday: Cream of tomato soup with cheddar biscuits

Friday: Chicken pot pie stew and buttermilk biscuits

Saturday: Chicken cordon bleu; green salad with vinaigrette; mashed potatoes

What We Ate (Week ending Aug 8 )

This week was low-key and busy, so I didn’t make many interesting things. The braised chicken was actually made on Wednesday, but the shallots were still onion-y and dish was practically inedible. It fared much better by sitting in the fridge for a day; we ate it on Thursday. It was much better, and I intend to redo that recipe in a slightly different way next time. When it’s good the first day, I’ll share it with you.

My brother got married this weekend, so we were away from home Friday night and Saturday morning. When we returned Saturday afternoon, the low-key soup was just right.

Sunday: [leftovers]

Monday: French toast

Tuesday: Parmesan risotto with peas

Wednesday: [leftovers]

Thursday: Braised chicken in mustard with garlic and mascarpone, rice, vegetables

Friday: [Dinner with family]

Saturday: [Wedding luncheon with family]; Dinner: Carrot Ginger Soup

You’ll note I don’t provide pictures of the food I cook. I’m not a professional food photographer, and I find that many pictures of home-cooked dinners look pretty awful when done by amateurs. Besides, many of these meals look pretty unappetizing when I prepared them, even without taking a picture of them. Nonetheless, they are tasty to me.

It says something about the week when I don’t post a single recipe. It was a good week in food, I just didn’t get a chance to write anything up. Nothing was original anyway.

I had intend to do a variety of posts in the past three weeks for Blog Post BINGO. I have not had time to do so. I didn’t realize how much my instinct to post regularly depends on comments. I have a number of general cooking discussion posts that I have considered posting, but talking to myself isn’t very fun. I may keep this blog a basic recipe and updates blog, simply because I am mainly keeping it for myself and my own cooking development. If you are reading this blog, I’d love to know what you’d like to read.

My favorite dish this week was the chicken and rice that my husband made. Oh, yum. It was tasty. He created it without a recipe, so I unfortunately can’t recreate it. Someday I may be able to create meals like that. That’s a goal.

Sunday

[leftovers]

Monday

Dilled chicken piccata; mashed potatoes; broccoli

Tuesday

Pork chops with mustard cream sauce; herbed potatoes; broccoli

Wednesday

Parmesan Risotto with peas

Thursday

Cream of Cucumber Soup; cheese sandwiches

Friday

Waffles

Saturday

Chicken and rice; mixed green salad with vinaigrette

I forgot to post my weekly report on Sunday, so here it is. Another good week. I loved the cucumber soup the best, and I’m going to make it again this week. I’m starting to not feel very creative in trying new menus; I feel I just keep repeating the old favorites. So be it. At least I’m cooking!

Sunday

white pizza; cream of cucumber soup

Monday

Cheese sandwiches [with leftovers]

Tuesday

Fettuccine Alfredo with peas

Wednesday

grilled chicken salad sandwiches

Thursday

French toast

Friday

steak with parsley butter; pasta with roasted cherry tomatoes and thyme

Saturday

BBQ with friends: rack of ribs; grilled chicken; mustard potatoes; peach and arugula salad; grilled corn