My new endeavor

I have to confess, I use blogger, but I don't know much about how it works.  I started a new blog yesterday, and I'm not sure if my regular blog readers were all notified about it or not.

It started on a whim.  A friend of mine asked for supper ideas on Facebook.  So I gave her a couple, and she said I should write a cookbook.  Instead, I decided to set up a blog with my recipes.  If you are interested, it is here: Recipes for the lazy cook.

Not all the recipes are really for lazy people, but most can be thrown together fairly easily.  They use a lot of prepared foods, like canned meats and vegetables, and frozen vegetables.  I'm also a big fan of the cleaned and chopped bags of vegetables in the produce section.  We're not talking haute cuisine, we're talking finding how to put some variety in your after work meals.

I started by posting recipes that I had created in My Fitness Pal when I was trying to lose weight.  I was amazed to notice that I had created eight pages of recipes!  So just yesterday, I transferred fifteen of them.  Some of them I didn't bother to transfer, as I thought they were simply too basic, but maybe, just maybe some people don't even know how to do the basic stuff, so I'll probably add them all.

I've made up more recipes since I stopped being so diligent on my diet and logging all my food.  I'll start putting them on the blog after I get through all the My Fitness Pal recipes.  I need to decide if I will create them in My Fitness Pal first, as doing so creates nutritional information.  Creating recipes is something I have done my entire life.  I don't know exactly when it started, probably when I was poor and depended on the ability to make tasty meals out of whatever I had on hand.

One of the shortcomings of the My Fitness Pal recipes is that there are just ingredients, no instructions.  I'm having to go back and create the instructions, and the instructions are probably way too simple for the non-cook.  I hope if people like the looks of the recipe and don't understand how to execute it, they ask me for more detail.

As I was thinking about the whole idea of recipe creation, I realized that I depend on certain herbs and spices for certain cuisines.  For example, when I want to cook something that tastes Italian, I use onions, garlic, basil, oregano and parsley.  I may or may not use mushrooms, peppers and wine, but I almost always use what I would call the Italian five.  The exceptions would be dish specific, as with Chicken Marsala, where the wine is the star of the dish, so no basil or oregano, or Chicken Cacciatore, where oregano would overtake the more subtle flavors of the dish.

When I want to cook something that tastes Oriental, I depend on onion, garlic, soy, ginger and sesame.  There may or may not be wine or cashews or vinegar, but the Oriental five are a given.  Peppers, cabbage, chilies are variables as are bean sprouts and water chestnuts and baby corn and mushrooms.

Mexican would always have onion, garlic, cumin, cilantro and cayenne.  The Mexican five.  Then there may be jalepeno's or hatch chilies or peppers or wine or vinegar or mesa or corn or beans or avocados.

You've probably noticed that everything has onion and garlic.  It is a rare cooking event for me that doesn't involve onion and garlic.

So I'm kind of all excited about this new endeavor.  I've been looking for something to get me excited, to help me feel like I'm helping someone, and this new recipe blog may be just thing.

Again, if I inundated you with notifications yesterday, I'm sorry.  Today will be just as annoying as I clean up my backlog of recipes.  Once I catch up, the volume will be reduced to once in a while.

If you see a recipe you like, but find the instructions too vague to follow, let me know and I will work with you to make them more clear.

Life is good!  There is always a new adventure around the corner if you look for one!  Food is a great platform for finding our common ground.  Eat happy my friends!