Sunday June 30, 2013

After spending a few days trying not to cook in my kitchen because it creates far too much heat in a house without AC/swamp cooler and 102 degrees outside, I broke down and cooked for lunch and dinner.  Our Zucchini are starting to come up.  I mean we will ONLY have 19 zucchini coming off our plants this week.  I have been picking them small in the hopes that we can eat them quicker and they won't become overwhelming.  I have been pinning zucchini recipes on pinterest for months in preparation.  I went through and made a board "Zucchini Laden" last night.  Yes, I will be laden with zucchini and hopefully so many good recipes that I will enjoy eating as many as we can this summer.

I made a Zucchini Linguine with olives, garlic, etc.  Here is a link to the recipe.

The bread crumbs didn't turn out super great because I didn't let them cook long enough.  We cut the olives in half, but we should have sliced them.  The red pepper certainly has a kick and Madalynn didn't like that a lot.  I am not an olive oil and noodles fan, but maybe that is because I had far to much regular vegetable oil poured on noodles while I was living in Uruguay as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Note to self: read all the instructions before cooking so you don't dirty more pans than necessary.  I also added crumbed bacon bits on top.  I wish I had remember to put those on while I was cooking the zucchini so that they were softer.  It was a great option for lunch.

For dinner I realized that I had an entire bag of red potatoes that I bought like a month ago in a cupboard.  It has been hard to find a new spot for my fresh produce since Russ took over the toaster oven area making his cookies.  So, once in a while I do forget the produce that I have bought.  He asked for oven roasted potatoes with Lipton Onion noodle soup mix. They turned out the best I have ever made them!!  I was so excited.  In the future I used 5 larger red potatoes with two packets of seasoning and I scraped and turned them over at least every ten minutes.  I cooked up some frozen broccoli (totally forgetting I was going to make a salad to use some lettuce from the garden and at least one of the remaining tomatoes we got from Vegas last week) and of course added cheese.  It was Sunday.  I am allowed to add fattening ingredients once a week.

Each night I think about the meat that we have stored in our deep freezer: beef, chicken, pork and fish.  I decide which one we have not had in a while and then figure out what sides will go with it.  I have not ever been a mustard fan, so when I read honey mustard recipes I usually don't pin them or try them.  Well, i googled Swai recipes and the first one that came up was a honey mustard recipe.  It was AWESOME!!  I will have to try honey mustard again.  One of the reviews said they had to double the cooking time because it was watery when they opened it.  That is what I had to do.  After the original amount of time I opened up the foil and I left it open while I doubled the time.  Madalynn even liked it and usually she won't eat fish.  It was a hit.  I will have to make it again.

Here is the link.

Russ made Root Beer Floats, Chocolate Chip Cookies and it has been a great night.  I look forward to some adventure tomorrow.

My kitchen blog

Ok, so here we go.  This is simply a blog to help me remember what we are cooking from day to day.  What we liked and disliked.  It is also a way to keep tabs on my eating habits to help me keep my family nurished and healthy.  I hope that I can keep up with it at least every couple days, but we will see.

This all started back in Dec.  After my son was born I had a renewed vigor and a lot more energy again.  I forgot how much I lack energy to do anything besides get to work and get home while I am pregnant.  Well, we moved into our first purchased home the day before Christmas Eve 2012.  It was the first time I have ever had space to unpack all my kitchen things.  Not only that, but I have space to put everything away.  It is so much easier to cook when everything has it's own specific spot and there is no clutter in the kitchen.

I made two goals.  They were somewhat specific but I was ok if I didn't follow through completely.  I think that that was the key to getting me to where I am today.

1.  No more eating out.  I needed to create a meal plan and eat in everyday.  Of course we still go out once in a while, however, while I was pregnant we ate out at least 2 meals a day nearly all nine months.  It was awful.  It is never a wonder how I gain weight during pregnancy.

2.  I needed to learn to cook.

So the 2nd one is just such an obvious part of "cooking" however I didn't know how to cook anything.  I mean, I could boil noodles, brown meat, saute a vegetable..but I was always nervous in even doing some of that.  I only EVER used garlic salt, salt, pepper and onion powder to season.  If something called for parsley that I would throw it on top, but seriously I had seasonings in the cupboard and didn't even know what was in there.

The best part of my seasonings cupboard is the home we bought already had great little shelves in the door.  I finally put labels on them a couple weeks ago, organized my seasonings and now can find anything I want.  I just need hooks for my teaspoons and Tablespoons so I can find them with ease when I am cooking.  But that is a post for another time.

As part of my cooking meals, I simply needed to find the excitement to be in the kitchen or a mentality to think through meals ahead of time so I actually cook.  I can honestly say that in the last 4 months I have not made Mac and Cheese once!!  I think that I made it every other day while I was pregnant.  I always put meat and vegetable in my Mac and Cheese sooooo maybe it is not soooo bad right?

So, now that I am writing this all down I am trying to come up with a time frame when everything happened and how ours lives have been changing.

I think the first thing that really happened comes from my old library card.  I went online to the Salt Lake County Library system and checked out/put holds on all sorts of crock pot cook books.  It wasn't so much to find specific recipes but just to find some overall new techniques of cooking the same things I knew how to cook.  During the school year my crockpot has to be my best friend.  I just don't have the time to cook once I get home.  If there is not a meal made then we look through our fast food coupons and grab  something to eat really late at night.

I found a bunch of my old meal plan calendars while I was trying to put together my recipe keeper.  It was interesting to note that I had 4 years of meal plan calendars; however, I really only do a good job filling them out for about 2-3 months a year and then it goes out the window.  Can't say i did any better this year but filling them out has helped me to plan in my head a lot better.  I also had a 4 hour shift a week at the studio I work at to plan and think through my meals.  Having time just to sit think and prepare has been helpful.

My first goal was to try and use up all our food storage in our deep freezers.  I have been storing food
and reading about freezer meals and such over the past year.  I did make and freeze three months worth of meals in August last year and will certainly do that again for this fall.  It helped me start on this path of consciousness and meal planning.

Then I began realizing how many different ways there were to cook the same thing.  I mean, I had heard about all of them in passing before, but I had never really thought about doing any of them myself.  In the past six months I had done all the following for the first time

Used and cooked with a smoker
Grilled on our camping grill and now on our new gas grill
Made salad dressing from scratch
Fried anything (yes, I had never fried anything in a deep pot of oil before)
Breaded my first meat
Grew and went out to pick vegetables straight from my garden to put in a meal right then
Canned Tomatoes
Used a Pressure Canner
Separated an egg
Made a soup from scratch (I have always opened a can from the store and just warmed it up)
Cooked a 20 lbs turkey
Cooked a steak
and made my first stir fry without a recipe.

Those might seem like small things to most people, but they are a huge deal to me.  I know that I have done a lot more things for the first time, however, I just can't think of any right now.

In buying our 1st home, I also felt like I could grow my own garden for the first time.  Before I simply didn't know how long we were going to live somewhere so I never planted anything.  I spent at least 3 months reading and reading and reading about plants and vegetables and what I could plant in our garden.  Then I had to prepare the ground (which took forever), plan my rows and plant.  On top of preparing and planting a garden, I had to research ways of cooking/using/preparing and preserving the food that came out of my garden.  Pinterest is my best friend for doing this.  While I think that some of my followers might hate how i seem to get on and pin like crazy, but pinterest is my visual bookmark list.  I actually do cook a lot-most of the things that I pin and they are there to find later when I want to find them again.

This week I checked out some more crockpot cook books, canning books and grilling recipe books.  I am the most excited about a book on herbs and seasonings I checked out.  I think that the more familiar I become with them the more likely I am to use them.

So there is a basic overview of my learnings and where I am today.  As I remember other things I will have to put them down.  Well we will see how this blog goes.  I have a sewing blog that i have not updated in forever, but I still take pictures of everything I make to put on there.  Eating and food is something that i have to do everyday of my life and therefore I need to make a journal of what we are making to keep track.

So, on we go on this journey.