Adventures in Cooking

Those of you who know me well, know that cooking has never been one of my strong points. Ok. That may be an huge understatement.

Exhibit A: The time I tried to make guacamole by putting an entire NOT RIPE avocado into a blender to mash it up. (I don't think I have to tell you this but, it didn't work.)

Exhibit B: The time I cut an entire green pepper with the wrong, non-sharp side of the knife. (In my defense, I had just woken up from a nap. I didn't know who I was much less what I was doing.)

Exhibit C: The time I cooked a frozen pizza but forgot to remove the cardboard from underneath, so the pizza never cooked. (Yes I know. It is nearly impossible to screw up a frozen pizza but I somehow did.)

I have several more of these incidents I could share but in an effort to not make myself look like a COMPLETE fool, I will keep them to myself.

In college I survived on a typical 18-22 year old's diet. Keep in mind that all of these things were consumed for breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner at some point in my college career. Cereal, chips and salsa, chips and queso, cheez-its, pizza rolls, pop tarts, rotisserie chicken, spaghetti, scrambled eggs, muffins, bagels, popcorn, and last but certainly not least, Velveeta Shells and Cheese. As you can see, none of these things really require any kind of skill to cook, except maybe the homemade spaghetti sauce, and none of these things are the least bit healthy. 

The years between college and Boston, I was living with my parents, who recently began an obsession with Master Chef and other cooking shows, and now make gourmet meals for practically every dinner they cook. Grilled corn on the cob, stuffed red peppers, grilled portobello mushrooms.... Those were the good old days....

Now that Chuckie and I are here in Boston alone, I feel a very strong responsibility for keeping us both alive.  Well, maybe alive is the wrong word. A responsibility for keeping us fed, and somewhat healthily fed if I can.  If I left it to Chuckie to feed us, we'd probably eat hot pockets or frozen pizzas every night. (Please note, he actually can make a frozen pizza without screwing it up. He also makes really good Easy Mac.)

I've made a lot of dinners from different cookbooks, websites, etc. but my favorite is still Skinnytaste.com, and so far none of the recipes have disappointed. Here are a few things I've made and the links to the recipes:

Fiesta Lime Rice
Garlic Shrimp
Pumpkin Cupcakes with Pumpkin Spiced Cream Cheese Frosting (aka the best thing you'll ever eat, ever.)
Angel Hair with Zucchini and Tomato (I substituted the regular noodles with Spaghetti Squash and also left out the chicken broth and used butter and lemon juice instead of olive oil.  So a slight variation of this.)

Coming up this week, I will attempt to make this one: Lowfat Baked Ziti with Spinach.

I think I'm really getting the hang of this cooking thing, although cutting open an uncooked spaghetti squash is probably one of the most difficult and dangerous things I've ever attempted. It may have taken 15-20 minutes, some sweat, and a few choice words, but I did it.

I think the key to cooking is confidence and it's just something that you have to work on, or at least for me it seems to be.  Some people are just naturals I guess. I am not one of those people. I need confidence! And luckily, Chuckie is good with boosting my cooking confidence. He'll eat anything.

Sometimes I feel a little like I Love Lucy when I'm cooking and something goes wrong. At least this has never happened to me. Yet....