Food!

"Food is an important part of a balanced diet."
Fran Lebowitz

An important part of our efforts to make better eating choices is being more intentional about cooking and eating at home. Luckily, even though I'm definitely not the world's greatest at it, I really enjoy planning meals and cooking and trying new recipes. So here's our plan for dinners for the next two weeks.

1. Slow Cooker Pot Roast
2. Veggie Curry (with Chicken)
3. Mini Honey-Mustard Meatloaves with Roasted Potatoes
4. Slow Cooker Lemon Chicken (from this cookbook, one of my favorites)
5. Shrimp with Scallions and Crispy Potatoes
6. Lighter General Tso's Chicken
7. Slow Cooker Beef Stew (with about 1/2 the beef and double the veggies called for... another "Fix it and Forget it" recipe)
8. Brown Rice Bowl with Shrimp, Snow Peas, and Avocado
9. Spicy Coconut Chicken Casserole
10. Slow Cooker Tuna Noodle Casserole ("Fix it and Forget it" again... I just love throwing it all in the crock pot and not being a rush after school/work)
11. Seared-Steak Fajitas
12. Ratatouille with Whole-Wheat Pasta
13. Cayenne-Rubbed Chicken with Avocado Salsa

Tonight I started things off with the veggie curry. It's in the "1-2-3" section of Everyday Food, and it was surprisingly quick and easy. I'm usually a little bit dubious about Martha's estimated time and effort notes for recipes, because they often call for things like "cooked, cubed chicken" or "peeled, quartered potatoes" and she's not factoring in the time and energy that go into preparing the ingredient list itself. So I started early, at 4 PM, to make sure dinner would be ready by 6 or so. Turns out everything was ready well before 5, which allowed me to squeeze in a 45-minute run around the neighborhood before dark (take THAT, Jonathan! I'm totally going to win the competition). And I didn't even make a huge mess in the kitchen. This recipe only required one small saucepan for the rice and one large heavy pot for the curry (it called for a dutch oven, which reminded me of dreams to one day own one of these... but then I snapped back to reality and found a big old hand-me-down pot).

Anyway, here are my ingredients all neatly gathered. Don't expect this much detail for all the meals listed here. That would take up far too much blog space and I know you'd rather look at Evelyn than a head of cauliflower.

And mere minutes later, we had this:

The recipe says it has 4 servings, but Jonathan and I both had what we'd consider sizeable portions and there was much more than half the batch left. It was pretty good, and definitely filling. It could certainly use more spice though. Red pepper flakes? More curry paste? I'm not sure what the best approach is to increase the kick in a curry dish. But like I said, not too bad. Oh, and we are still huge fans of Everyday Food Magazine. Totally worth the cost. I'm excited to mine our old issues for recipes we haven't tried, and to pull out the old standbys like #13 up above.

The cooking adventures will continue. Bon appetit!

And soon, perhaps I'll get to be half as awesome as my sister-in-law at sewing and I can do a little sewing post here and there. I have a "Getting to Know Your Machine" sewing class on February 5th so be prepared for some exciting posts once I learn how to do some amazing sewing feats such as turning on the machine, threading it, et cetera...