My month long challenge to cook all new meals ended late last week. The grand finale was sweet and sour chicken, requested by my daughter. It is absolutely her favorite treat for us to take her to out for Chinese and to order that. She kindly stated that “since you can make restaurant meals now, can you make those for me?” I say this not to pat myself on the back to claim the most magnificent culinary skills, but to tell you that we enjoyed it – it was worth it, and indeed it often seemed like we were eating restaurant meals, not home meals. Maybe this is all just to say that maybe I was just really not a great cook before. I mean, I made whole, good, healthy foods for my family often, but the number one thing that I discovered over the past month was that everything I cooked before was relatively tasteless. I couldn’t believe the spices almost every meal I made called for! I used spices that until now have done nothing but sit in my pantry. It’s not that I didn’t have them, I didn’t know how to use them. I was so afraid of using too much and instead I was using not enough.

Chicken Tortilla Soup

When the month started and I printed out recipes and scoured websites to try to find foods we’d all enjoy that would be challenging, but not so much so that it was a bust, I was very nervous. As it turns out, never once did we have to go out to eat and only twice did my kids decide that they’d rather have yogurt and bananas for dinner instead of what I made. The first few meals, I’m not going to lie, took a long time. I wasn’t used to reading recipes and so much planning in the kitchen. I usually just pull out something, decide it’s going to be the basis of our meal and concoct something relatively simple from that. It was challenging, but rewarding to use some things I hadn’t thought of and to make things that often until the last minute of cooking I was sure I had ruined.

Tuscan-Style Chicken with Italian Sauteed Beans

I discovered that my hubby and I love Thai food (I think he already knew that about himself, but I didn’t know it about him and I certainly didn’t know it about myself). I discovered that there is more to dinner than meat and potatoes. I learned that I go through a lot of garlic and olive oil. And I learned that homemade mozzarella sticks are seriously insanely delicious, although not even remotely healthy. The goal was not to be really healthy, and I think I did a nice mix of meals that ranged from entirely deep-fried fat filled to uber healthy tofu and vegetables. I am all about moderation around here and the challenge of new meals for 30 days was long enough for me to really spread out a wide variety of foods and experiment with a lot of new things.

Some other recipes I tried and loved but didn’t take pictures of (I am not a food photog!) are:

Cheese Tortellini Soup
Curried Cod Filet
Shrimp and Zucchini with Bowties in Light Tomato Sauce

Hopefully you can find some cooking inspiration from some of this, since I know all about how discouraging a rut in the kitchen can feel and how unmotivated I can get when it’s time to make dinner and I’m uninspired.

Happy cooking!

I am not going to tell you every last meal I have made over the past two weeks. Nearly all have been hits with the whole family, but I thought I’d just share a few favorites.

Lemon Orzo Salad with Veggie and Chicken. My kids loved this despite the green stuff on the chicken.

Heidi shared this recipe for Dixie Pork Chops. My family *loves* pork chops. This was a huge hit. I even shared the recipe with my mom for a birthday dinner she was making for a friend. Rave reviews came pouring in. Try this.

Pad Thai. Nobody loved this more than I did. So yummy. I made it with just tofu, no shrimp. I could not wait to eat the leftovers for lunch the next day. Apparently, neither could hubby because he took ALL THE LEFTOVERS to work with him. I was peeved!! I can’t wait until this challenge is over so I can make it again.

Olive Oil, Tomato and Basil Pasta. Last week at yoga, my friend was telling our instructor about my blog and the dinner challenge – she told me about this dish and I have no idea if I did it right. I found something similar online to what I ended up making, only I also put in cubes of mozzarella and added chopped up garlic per yoga instructors directions. Everybody loved it except my daughter who had a piece of garlic touch her mouth and screamed “MY MOUTH IS ON FIRE!!” for a while afterward. For those of us in the less dramatic crowd, this one is good!!

Last night, I made Thai Coconut Curry Shrimp. Every spring when my parents leave for the season, they clean out their pantry and give everything to me. I had a can of lite coconut milk that I had no idea what to do with. I found this recipe online and I drooled all day long thinking of making this dinner. It. Was. Amazing. If no other meal made this month long challenge worth it, this one did. Sooooo goooood.

Some things I’ve learned so far:

• Scary ingredients are not that scary. In fact, they are delicious.
• Brown rice is not horrible just because it takes twice as long to cook.
• It costs no more to try new than it did to buy the same old stuff every week.

I have opened my pantry and my refrigerator and taken out things that have sat for too long because I either didn’t know what to do with them or was afraid it would be too hard, or that no one would like it. When I started this challenge and said to myself “the worst that can happen is we go out for pizza”, I let all of those worries go. No, not everyone likes everything I make. But they also haven’t died of food poisoning. I am learning to love the *process* of cooking again – the chopping, the following a recipe, the excitement when I put plates in front of everyone and none of us know what it’s going to taste like.

I have also learned that my 4 year old is adorable beyond words. All he says every night when I put dinner on the table is “Mommy? Do I love this?” and I say “Yes, Eli, you love this dinner!” and he eats it and – loves it. I wish kids stayed little forever!!

What have you been serving up for dinner lately? I still have weeks to go – so feel free to hit me with more ideas.

 and like this on the other:

It’s the second picture that always bothered me. The upper cabinets were too tall (we have low ceilings) but since they came in the lot of them that we found on ebay way back when, hubby used them. He hated to *not* use them even if they weren’t quite right. So, he made this little corner. What bothered me was that I had this whole area of countertop that I could barely use for more than a few do dads and for piling up organizing papers.

Imagine my delight when while we were away, hubby got a new – free! – microwave that got the ball rolling on a whole new kitchen project. I don’t think he knew what he was in for, and neither did I. The day we got home from vacation, he ripped down those too tall cabinets to put shorter ones in their place (that we already had in another spot that wasn’t working – more on that another day).

Of course we had painted since the installation of the cabinets which meant we needed to repaint. I figured if we had to paint, we might as well pick a new color. So, I chose Behr Cumberland Fog. You should know this about me and choosing paint. I am not one of those people that brings home sample after sample until I get a color just right. I walk into a store, pick up a handful of paint cards and choose one. The only color I’ve ever hated was one someone else made by mixing colors and chose for me. I am not the queen of choosing paint colors – I just know what I like and don’t waste time, I guess. You could show me 26 light blue paint colors and I’d love all of them so why bother wasting time making sure it’s perfect? I know I’ll like it just fine.

Hubby got to painting – which also meant that he painted all the trim white again – yay! So fresh and shiny clean looking now. Having him paint the trim sure beats me having to scrub it. Then he put up the new cabinets, built some open shelving between them and we finally had a functional space in my kitchen where I can store stuff and use the countertop for more than clutter. I also took this opportunity to make a new not clashing curtain for that little section of cabinet. A friend gave me a shower curtain she’d never taken out of the package. I didn’t need a shower curtain so I used it to make this instead.

Here’s the rest of the kitchen with the new blue paint color:

That shelf in the middle of the kitchen isn’t staying. Hubby is still working on one area, so that has been floating around and I’m trying to decide if I can live with walking around a kitchen island all the time before I bite the bullet and buy the island that I love at Ikea. Enough explaining. There it is. New blue in the kitchen and some new functional counter space!

Yes, the chalkboard in the background says First Day of School 2011. Aren’t they cute?

It took spending the summer in the middle of nowhere and having to make a big trek to grocery shop once a week for me to realize that I cook the same things all the time for dinner. Each week when I made my big list and headed off to the store, I thought about how boring dinner has gotten. Sure, I could practically cook our regular meals with my eyes closed at this point, but I also should be challenging myself more. Challenging myself to try new things, challenging my family to try to eat healthier and stop requesting their same (not always good for us) meals. I am actually pretty happy with the things we eat, but I could certainly mix things up a bit and fix them differently.

So, when I returned from our trip, I vowed to make all new to me dinners for a month. I pulled out my dusty cookbooks, looked up some popular food blogs and printed off some recipes that sounded yummy and got started. For four nights now, we’ve eaten all new to us recipes. Not all wild and out there different foods, but mostly just things prepared in new ways to make dinner more interesting. I have discovered how much like a little dinner robot I was. Now that I have to read recipes, measure things out and really pay attention while cooking to make sure I am doing it right, I realize how long it’s been since I’ve challenged myself in the kitchen.

I’m using those cookbooks pictured above, some recipes from my mom, and I’ve been perusing sites like Our Best Bites, but I have to tell you I am not really a foodie. I like good food and I like to cook but it’s not something I think about much or pay much attention to. But now I want to more so that I can add some interesting things to our dinner rotation.

Please share links to favorite recipes, favorite websites to find recipes, good cookbooks. I don’t have many criteria. We eat pretty healthy, not a lot of meat, I love seafood and vegetarian recipes although I am not vegetarian – usually I will just tweak a recipe to make it vegetarian. I am trying to get us away from eating so much pasta and so much mexican.

I look forward to your suggestions!

Friday night is our usual pizza night around here. You can find at that link the recipe for the dough I make.

Usually, I sizzle up some onions and peppers, throw on some artichoke and olives and feta all atop olive oil and am one happy mama while everyone else eats their cheese and pepperoni pizza made by me.

This past Friday, I decided to try something new instead of just olive oil on mine. I spread pesto on first, then topped with sizzled up onion and green pepper (from the garden!) then topped with feta. I try to make my pizza each Friday with what I have on hand and not make extra trips for toppings. I was going to have a pretty skimpy pesto, onion and feta pizza when I remembered the peppers growing in the garden. It was perfect!

I never cease to be totally smitten with bringing food in from my backyard.

What do you like on your pizza?

There is something I probably haven’t shared with you much before. I am married to a man that is obsessed with growing food. Here in Florida, it’s not the easiest undertaking to plant and care for a garden full of food in the heat of summer. We have had occasional success with growing jalapeno peppers, strawberries, and green peppers in our raised beds, but by the time we are picking and eating from the garden, it feels like we put a lot of time and energy into a garden that gives us little reward. Good thing we mostly do it for the hobby part of it, to have something to do, to teach our kids about where foods come from, and to make one less trip to a store to buy fruits or veggies from a plastic container.

One thing we have had great luck with planting is fruit trees. A new part of his planting obsession, I have to be careful letting him go out anymore because he always comes home with new trees to plant. We have the usual orange, lemon, grapefruit and lime trees that we all enjoy watching bloom. Also, our yard is full of not so usual olive trees, a fig tree (that was here and huge and well established when we bought the house), some blueberries, and last weekend we added 6 kiwi trees to our yard. I can’t wait for those. Kiwis are one of my favorite fruits but I never buy them.

There is something so completely charming to me about stepping outside my house and walking to a tree to pick fruit from it and to feed my family something yummy from it. I love that my kids can go from swinging on the swings or playing soccer in the yard to stopping all of that and wanting to have a snack from our yard. And it makes my husband happy to think he’s one step closer to feeding us the day that there is no more food in the grocery store. I sort of joke, but he really does worry about such things.

Two years ago, I took the kids to a local nursery and let them each pick a tree that they wanted to bring home. They could pick anything. My daughter picked a mulberry tree and my son, who does everything she does, chose one too. We came home that day with two scrawny mulberry trees and I was told we’d get berries from them in about 7 years. Imagine my delight when it was blossoming last year and this spring we have had more mulberries than I knew what to do with. We are picking new ripe berries from the trees every day right now. While my kids love just snacking on them and throwing them into their yogurt, I had so many that I realized I’d have to start baking with them to use them up.

Last week, I was inspired by Alicia when she made a yummy looking baked treat with some that her family picked recently.

Last week, I was cleaning out my kitchen cupboards and found that I have 5 pie dishes. FIVE. I have never in my life baked a pie. Or used one of those glass pie plates. Why do I have them? Where did they come from? Probably just another example of something someone gave me and I kept because I am supposed to have pie plates. So, yesterday, I put one to use and made a mulberry cobbler.

To get started, I sent a helper outside to pick a bunch of mulberries for me

Then I gave her a bath!

Here’s what you’ll need to make one of your own:

• 2 cups mulberries
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 6 tablespoons butter
• 3/4 cup of whole wheat flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup milk

What to do:

• Rinse the mulberries with water. You do not need to remove the stems.
• Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
• In a bowl combine the mulberries with the sugar. Mix well.
• Melt the butter and pour it into a pan. Cover the bottom of the pan with the melted butter.
• In a seperate bowl, combine the flour, baking powder and salt. Mix well. Add the milk to the mixture to make batter.
• Pour the batter evenly into the glass pan. The butter will come up around the edges, that’s okay.
• Spoon mulberries evenly over batter.
• Bake for 40 minutes.

I am sure this would be delicious served with vanilla ice cream. We had our servings yesterday with French Vanilla yogurt and that was quite yummy as well.

Enjoy!

We got home armed with bags of strawberries enough to fulfill our smoothie addiction for at least 2 days.

It doesn’t get much simpler than this:

• 2 cups strawberries
• 1 cup nonfat milk
• 2 tbsp peanut butter
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 2 tbsp yogurt, if you like
• If you are the banana eating type, which I am NOT – yuck (a new fun fact for you about me), my daughter claims they are very yummy in this too.

**sometimes I don’t feel like having the milk, so I’ll just use a handful of ice cubes instead.

This is my absolute favorite meal ever. I used to eat it all the time, as in at least once, sometimes twice a day. Apparently I am elderly now, though, and some of my favorite ingredients started giving me heartburn so I had to cut way back on it. It had been a while since I’d indulged myself so when I did yesterday I actually took a picture presenting an opportunity to share this with you. I always mean to share more about my adventures in the kitchen but then don’t take pictures before food is devoured. Not this time.

There are a lot of variations I use based on what I have on hand at the time.

Ingredients:

• 2 cans chick peas, drained and rinsed
• 1/2 small red onion, chopped finely
• 1/2 large cucumber (not included in the photo b/c I didn’t have any but I almost always use it otherwise) – you can peel it and seed it then chop it but I don’t. I just chop it up and throw it in.
• 1/2 cup feta cheese (my favorite food ever)
• olives (I usually use kalamata but black are fine, too)
• fresh cilantro (my 2nd favorite food) chopped
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
• salt (to taste)
• cracked black pepper (to taste)

* I hear this recipe is also very yummy with chopped tomato, but I don’t like tomatoes so I don’t use it.

It is best when made and then chilled for a few hours or overnight. I can never wait so I usually have some right away and the next day it is even yummier. It is good just as a salad by itself, or wrapped, or stuffed in a pita.

I made cupcakes in the middle of the day today. Left them for my girl to frost when she got home from school. Both kids wanted to know what the occasion was. “Who is having a birthday?” No one. We’re celebrating just because. It’s Monday. Every Monday can use cupcakes with strawberry frosting, I think.

My hubby brought me home a Holly tree a couple days ago. Someone had pulled it up and was getting rid of it where he works. That poor holly tree. What a time of year to get kicked to the curb. It’s happily planted in our yard now. I’ve had the song Have a Holly Jolly Christmas in my head ever since.

My mom talked me into baking Christmas cookies. For the past few Christmases, my parents have been traveling so I have been in charge of the yearly mailing of family recipe Christmas cookies to my brother. With them home this year, I figured I was off the hook but she invited me to do it with her. Then it turned into her making gingerbread at her house and me making the family recipe ones at my house. The ones that fill my kitchen with the aroma of anise. The ones with cinnamon candies intended to look like holly berries or Christmas ornaments or eyes depending on how they are placed on a certain shape of cookie.

I was dreading making the cookies, mostly because I never feel like I am doing it just right or that they will be just like my grandma’s. I get stressed and the whole process makes me cranky but once it’s over and there are dozens of frosted cookies in my kitchen, I am glad I did it. I always realize when it’s over that I was silly to worry. They come out just right and they taste just like grandma’s and I am flooded with lots of wonderful memories (and a few extra calories).

This year, my 6 year old daughter helped me. We started at 9:30 Friday night and were both asleep covered in flour at 11:45. We woke up Saturday morning ready to make frosting and decorate them and then at last they were done. It was just as it always is while we were making the cookies. I was stressed. I got annoyed. I was tired. I wanted to just stop when we were halfway done and call it good. My daughter had been making it harder, not listening or helping. But she really really wanted to finish, so she kept me going when she saw I was going to call it quits. Suddenly, she was all helpful and she rolled and cut while I kept my eye on the oven and moved done ones to cooling racks. I was seriously floored and brought to tears by the end of the night. Good, happy tears. I told her I wouldn’t have been able to do it without her. It was like she was my little angel gently guiding me to the end of this project with grace and a smile. A Christmas miracle.

My family’s cookie recipe:

Preheat oven to 375.

1 cup Crisco shortening
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
4 eggs
3 tbsp. water
1 tsp. anise
•
6 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 tsp. nutmeg

Cream Shortening
Add sugars
Beat eggs, add
Add water and anise

Mix & sift dry ingredients- add to creamed mixture.
Make into balls; chill.

(I double the dough recipe)

And the frosting we use:

1 egg white
2 tsp. cold water
½ tsp. vanilla
¾ – 1 cup conf. sugar

(I made 6x and still had some leftover)

Decorate to your heart’s content. You may want to go lighter on the sprinkles than my kids did!