Creative Cooking

Cooking and I have a love hate relationship.  I do love to cook in some seasons.  Who doesn't love the smell of cooking on a cold day?  Comfort food some call it.  At other times I'm quite content with a good TV dinner.  Hey now, no gasps of outrage!  I love living in a modern age where dinner can be whipped up in 15 minutes or less!  Don't think for a moment that our great-great grandmas wouldn't have been thrilled to have an oven that didn't sweat 10 pounds off you in a week!  Or that they wouldn't have enjoyed the ease of picking up some loaves of bread at the store instead of planning a whole day to bake a dozen loaves of bread for the week.  Romanticizing the good old days only works from this end of the spectrum folks.  For those who lived it, not so much!  However, we can still find some awesome things to carry on, sans the wood burning cook stove.

I've some recipes I've favored over the years and passed down to my daughter upon request.  I love old cook books for the pre-calorie counting recipes that make the mouth water and the stomach whimper!  I have always looked at cooking in one sense as chemistry lessons.  You have to understand how to combine certain ingredients to come up with awesome tasting items.  Fresh ingredients are good!  Farmer's markets are fun, but can be expensive.  Don't bypass your local grocery store thinking that it's a horrible place.  Just learn to read, then pick and choose things you'll eat.  Not things you think you should eat, but things you WILL eat so that you don't waste money.  Plant a garden with things you'll eat.  Save what you can if you can.  Freeze it, can it (we'll talk about that on another page!), dry it if you've time, or eat it fresh.  Gardens really are fun to have, and if you have children, you have little hands to help with weeding and harvest!

Now, there's a lot more to cooking than just plopping things in a pot.  At least that's what they tell me.  I have my approach, which I call 'Creative Cooking'.  That means using what I have on hand and not necessarily what's on a recipe card.  We'll talk more about it next time!