I was just reading over my last Cooking entry, and I noticed this excerpt:
So much for self-injury. I've also been terribly scatterbrained, forgetting key ingredients to every one of the dishes I planned to prepare this weekend.
That was just a couple of weeks ago, but the funny thing is, it also goes the other way. Last week I went to the PCC with Jeff for groceries, and I saw that they had lots of winter squash for a reasonable price, so I got one that was under the butternut squash
sign and turned out to be spaghetti squash (okay, so my squash recognition skills are lacking!). Saturday morning I looked in the Joy of Cooking for squash recipes, planning to get whatever extra ingredients I needed on the way home from class.
It turned out that I had absolutely everything I needed to make a savory squash puree, even heavy cream and parsley, which I don't usually stock! It was awesome to realize that I could just go out and buy the main part of a dish (i.e. squash) and expect to have everything else I need at home already. Obviously this doesn't work with everything, but I'm getting to the point where I have enough basic ingredients (and that I use the perishable ones fast enough for me to have them on stock all the time) that I don't need to make a huge shopping list every time I want to cook something. The more I cook, the easier it is to keep cooking.
Another nice note about last weekend's cooking is that I put dinner in the slow-cooker about mid-morning, and it was almost ready when I got home from class in the early evening. Dinner was chicken fricassee, a sort of amalgam of the Joy of Cooking recipe and the slowcooker-cookbook version. I mostly followed the slowcooker cookbook, but I mixed some heavy cream into the juices just before serving, which made it rich and creamy. (The heavy cream that I used in the squash was originally intended for the fricassee, but there was enough to use in both.) Jeff and I have been eating chicken and squash for half a week, and it's delicious.
Post a comment