Cooking Is Fun

While I have not been very successful in my knitting attempts lately (it is actually a multi-part series of frustrations, I just thought I'd save the next whining for a few days), my kitchen time has been GREAT. I recently made stroganoff with ground turkey, making it up as I went along, and it turned out just as I had hoped. If I have a particular dish in mind, I prefer to follow a recipe because I am not that confident in my own cooking skills yet, so this was a great ego booster. Especially as it was about the same time I was having so many knitting frustrations.

I've been making a lot of salads to boost our vitamin and mineral intake as it gets colder. They've been having arugula at the store lately, which is my all-time favorite green leafy veggie. I got some radicchio, too, and added some to get a great color contrast with the green. All our salads for the past couple of weeks have been these with some variation of orange wedges, golden raisins, pomegranate seeds, avocado, roasted beets, red onion, red pear and homemade salad dressing. This week I've been tending to simpler salads with just arugula, cherry tomatoes, feta, and avocado.

Next to the salad you can see Rachel Ray's black bean stoup from her 365 meals book. I had been craving black bean soup and realized I had never made it before. We had it with salad and quesadillas with salsa. Another recent cooking experiment involved adapting chicken piccata to tilapia. I thought the lemon butter sauce with capers would work nicely with a white fish, and I was right. We had that with a risotto of mushrooms, carrots, and peas, and of course, a salad.

Lastly, as I've been indulging in my cravings, I HAD to make a batch of double chocolate cookies. Usually, I only get to have these when I buy them at a coffee shop or bakery, since had never tried to make them before. For this recipe, I consulted my Best Recipe cookbook- the ONLY baking cookbook, as far as I'm concerned. These cookies turned out fabulous. Amazing. So incredibly, dangerously good. I had to wonder if it was partly due to the Nestle baking cocoa I used instead of Hershey's, but I won't go back to Hershey's to find out. They also had chocolate chips (I forgot which brand) and walnuts. Needless to say, they are all gone already.

So, even if my knitting has not been successful, we have been eating well at the FIG household, and that is certainly more important. After all ,you cannot live by yarn alone.