Cooks in the Kitchen: Week 1

I spend a lot of time in the kitchen. It's inevitable when you cook three meals a day from scratch, but over the last couple of years I've gotten better at finding shortcuts and making use of my time.  While my system is far from perfect, having sources for good recipes and inspiration *cough*pinterest*cough* has helped a lot. So while I’m not sure how much interest there is in this sort of thing, I thought it might be helpful to some people if I shared some of what I've found. I'm also kind of curious to see how my (newish) menu planning tracks over time as I don't have any sort of record outside of the occasional tweet. In the past I’ve mainly cooked the same couple of dishes, with seasonal variation, but since I’ve been trying to find less labor intensive ways of cooking, I’ve been experimenting more with other things. I’m intending this series to cover what I cooked (generally in one day) for the week as well as any menu considerations outside of my insistence on buying the bulk of my grocery items on sale. I’ll also include thoughts on any of the new to me recipes and adaptations I’ve made.

To kick things off starting with this week, I made spaghetti squash with meatballs in the crock pot following the suggestions here, and subbing out the jarred sauce for this tomato-free recipe. I also made a tomato-free chili using this recipe, as well as chicken and dumplings. For the stew I used the recipe found here, substituting these dumplings (at the bottom of the post) for the almond flour ones in the original recipe. The tomato-free dishes are an experiment. In part I wanted to avoid the tomatoes since they don’t always agree with me, something that’s inconvenient when cooking in large batches, but I also wanted to diversify the vegetables I was eating, which I think both recipes do. For snacks I ended up with two sweet dishes, an egg-free pumpkin custard and pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. I hadn’t intended to end up with two pumpkin dishes again, but the cookies looked too good to pass up, particularly since I just ordered more carob powder. The custard was half curiosity half a recent obsession with gelatin, which I can’t seem to get enough of. Breakfast will be my usual sausage/ground beef recipe along with eggs and broccoli. All in all I have six servings of each dish and a package of pork ribs in the fridge still which gives me the seventh day for this week.

With the spaghetti squash I left out the wine, and added an extra splash of apple cider vinegar, which turned out to be a mistake. There’s now a distinctly sour bent to the recipe, which while not unpleasant, completely removes an illusion that the recipe might contain actual tomatoes. The chili is great as is, although I wouldn’t mind a thicker sauce or more vegetables in the mix. The chicken and dumplings also worked out well although I wish I had more carrots since the measly few I had on hand weren’t enough. I do really like the bag of cauliflower I added though, it helped beef up the stew a bit which I like. Both dessert recipes are flawless. For now I wouldn’t change anything with either of them.