Time to Cook

You may have noticed that I was doing a lot of baking the last several months. While I was enjoying doing all that baking and trying a lot of new recipes, I couldn't really be bothered to get excited about cooking. Of course I cooked, but it's been a lot of heating up frozen veggie burgers and whatever else is the least amount of work.

I thought it was about time to say goodbye to the baking frenzy for awhile and start to actually cook real homemade food again. It doesn't always work out this way in practice, but I try to cook as close to "from scratch" as possible. I'm not making my own cheese or pasta or anything like that, but I do try to avoid boxed mixes and prepackaged foods (not counting Boca "chicken" nuggets and veggie burgers). Part of that is for health and part of that is just because I like to do things myself and I am proud of my cooking skills and want to keep building on them.

So yesterday was a grocery shopping day. I realize that just going and getting random stuff rarely leads to good meals, so I thought I better pick out and handful of recipes for the weekend and into next week and make sure I get all the ingredients for those. I have a lot of recipes saved on Pinterest, so I picked out four from there.

Skillet Gnocchi with Spinach and White Beans
Chunky Vegetable Soup
Spiced Dal with Cilantro Yogurt
Mediterranean Macaroni and Cheese

I probably eat more pasta and cheese than I should, so it's pretty good that only half of those are pasta/gnocchi heavy.

Skillet Gnocchi -- I forgot to photograph it before, so here is a lovely pic of the leftovers.

I made the gnocchi yesterday evening. I've made this recipe before and it's very good! The original recipe is here, and calls for chard but I opted for spinach instead. I also used white wine instead of water simply because I had some on hand for cooking. The good thing is I should be able to get two more meals out of it (I love leftovers!).

Chunky Vegetable Soup with cornbread

Today for lunch I made the vegetable soup. This was a new one for me.The recipe is here. I used dried thyme instead of fresh (Hy-Vee didn't have any!), Better Than Bouillon No Chicken flavor (but only half the amount according to the instructions on the jar, to reduce sodium), and pepe style pasta. I also added chopped fresh spinach because I had some on hand. (I'm kind of kicking myself because I had some pearled barley on hand I've been meaning to try in a soup like this but I forgot about until after I'd already added the pasta. Next time!)

It was very good! Jonathan enjoyed it too. Also made enough for at least two more meals, which is great! I love it when my cooking effort lasts for days. We ate it with honey cornbread and homemade apple butter.

In a day or two, I'll be making the other recipes for the first time. I can't wait to try them.