Learn to cook

I’m still not super great or anything, but I can handle the basics, and even come up with stuff on the fly. Last night I made what I am calling “cabbage lasagna” which is like lasagna only with cabbage leaves instead of noodles, or alternately like cabbage rolls, only not rolled up :)

I don’t recommend buying a head of cabbage if you live by yourself. I’m gonna be eating cabbage all week lol!

Yesterday made a breakfast taco with real potato, fresh bell pepper and onions. I need to buy some salsa and then I’ll be like my mom, unable to enjoy commercial breakfast tacos (sorry, egg, cheese and potato are all mandatory it’s everything else that is optional! the idea of just an egg and potato taco—heresy!)

Today, made french toast with homemade wheat bread, freshly grated nutmeg. It was yummy!

Steel cut oats are my winter default but that hardly counts as cooking, I think.

I need to learn to make my own granola :)

I made salmon cakes with garlic and lemon mayonnaise, without a recipe. They came out pretty good, but not quite restaurant quality.

I made cheese tortellini (frozen) with butternut squas soup. I put too much pepper in it, though. I think this would be better if I could turn the soup into more of a butternut cream sauce, maybe by blending in a little bit of milk or low fat cream cheese. Also, some fresh herbs, but I’m not sure which ones :)

I baked bread! It was a no knead recipe, which is nice since I don’t have a bread maker, and it came out ok. It’s not great, the taste is kind of funny, but the texture is good, especially for being almost whole wheat. I made French toast with it this morning.

I finally cooked a successful roast in the crock pot. It was a very fatty cut of meat, though, so I am hoping I can get some of the fat out when I use the leftovers in other dishes (it is kind of gross!) I made gravy out of some of the broth, and saved the rest for the future. I made some of the left overs into a yummy BBQ pork sandwich already! Tonight I am making them into an asian-styled pasta dish. I don’t have a recipe for these, I am just inventing them, yay!

I also made butternut squash soup, which came out alright. It’s not gourmet or anything, it mostly just tastes like pureed squash. I am trying to figure out what to add to it to fix it. I think cream cheese. I added a dollop of goat cheese and parsley as a garnish and it went really well. It’s one of the first times I have thought up my own garnish, or even “garnished” the food at all.

So I am making progress on this, I think.

My goal is to start “cooking right,” by which I mean actually having all the ingredients prepared BEFORE I start cooking, so I’m not trying to chop stuff in time and then overcooking things or whatever. I like that about the crock pot, it’s all just in to the pot and done, no timing.

not from a box, figured how to make a cheese sauce from scratch last night. (It’s milk, butter, and cheese!). It came out ok, but too much milk in it, and the canned crab I threw in didn’t really add a lot, but hey, CHEESE SAUCE

I tried to make this post tenderloin thing in the crockpot, but it turned out dry and bland. I think this is because 1) I couldn’t find a “tenderloin” at the grocery store, and bought a sirloin instead. I think the sirloin is too lean. and 2) I cooked it for an hour longer than it said to. An hour on low shouldn’t matter in the crockpot, but maybe my crockpot just gets hotter! I need to use it more and remember to shorten the times!

it was an easy recipe, though, so if I can get it right, and it tastes good, would be a handy one to have in the cooking arsenal.

My fajitas today came out much better, but still not perfect—meat maybe a little dry, and onions done too much while peppers not done enough, so all those little adjustments need to be made, and then hopefully they will be yummy! Of course, sour cream and cheese would help, too, but I don’t have any of that.

My Fajitas last night had good flavor but were inedible because the meat was too tough and stringy. Bah!

They needed to be cooked about 5 times as long as the recipe said, and they needed a bunch of garlic and onion powder and some salt dumped in (though maybe that’s because I didn’t use the “optional” bacon). BUT, they tasted pretty good! I am happy with them and look forward to eating more of them, which is good because I have about 8 cups left!!! Half of it I’m going to freeze for instant fibery goodness later.

This week I’m going to buy one of those precooked chickens at the grocery store and see what I can do with it (chicken sandwich, chicken salad, chicken salad sandwich, salad with chicken on it, pasta salad with chicken in it, lol)

And last night was no exception. Ate some of it, my guest ate quite a bit and asked me to save leftovers for him, but I ended up eating Dairy Queen a few hours later, lol.

I don’t know what it is, I just never like the stirfrys that I make. I like chinese restaurant food, maybe it’s the frying. Oh Well, I think I might permanently give up on making stirfry, because it’s so much freakin work anyway!