I love to cook

I love to cook, and I'm good at it too. I just don't do it very often. But when I cook, I really cook. Today I made zucchini bake, potato soup, minestrone, and a yummy macaroni casserole that I've yet to name.

Last week, I went nuts at Aldi. In addition to bags and bags of canned goods, frozen veggies, and pastas, I bought way too much produce. It wasn't really too much. I just didn't cook/eat at home as much last week as I had planned to. Tuesday through Friday of this week are total craziness, so I knew that if I wanted to use this stuff I'd better do some cooking today.

I started out with the potato soup. I used my recipe for potato corn chowder, but made a few adjustments including adding carrots and celery. It turned out really well.

Then I used the onions, red pepper, green pepper, zucchini and tomatoes for the zucchini bake. I let it cool and then put it over pasta to make indivdual
meals.

I needed to use up the rest of the zucchini and pasta and some more of the celery, so I made up my own minestrone recipe throwing together some canned beans and tomatoes with some spices and frozen vegetables. I wish I had paid attention to how much if everything I was using, because the final product was amazing.

I had another green pepper to use, plus some green onions that wouldn't last much longer. A box of mac and cheese, a can of diced tomatoes with chilies, frozen corn, and some sharp cheddar cheese were added and I had a casserole.

And now I have freezer meals for quite awhile.

My mom's mother was a wonderful cook. I think sometimes my mom felt that she wasn't as good a cook as her mother, but my mother taught me a lot about creative cooking. My mom was a creative cook mostly out of necessity. We had some really lean times when I was growing up. It's hard to find variety when you have to keep coming back to the same really cheap basics. My mom could make delicious meals with hotdogs as the main ingredient. I do not like hotdogs, but I would eat those dishes.

I don't do much experimenting with hotdogs in my cooking, but I do enjoy seeing what I have and trying to make something tasty from it. And the more I do it, the better I get.

-- Posted from my iPhone