cooking

I’m enjoying my new-found passion for cooking. My mom was a great cook, her mom was a great cook, all the women in her family were great cooks. My dad’s mom was a great cook, too. By all rights, I should have gotten plenty of cooking genes! I used to cook, but somewhere along the way decided I didn’t like cooking and quit almost entirely. I still made spaghetti, tacos, stuffed bell peppers and swiss steak, but most everything else fell by the wayside. When we wanted something special we went out. But with us being so close to retirement and starting to practice living on less money, cooking at home was a no-brainer for saving money. At first, Mr WS wasn’t completely on board for eating at home (I’m sure he was skeptical that I could cook anything really great), but now he can’t wait to see what I cook next. The money we save by eating at home? It’s going into a special savings account so we can wander as much as we want to when we retire. Life is good.

This whole cooking thing started when I found a blog about a family living in an old stone cottage in England (Mutterings from the Moor… the link is on the right-hand side) and after enjoying that site, I checked out her links to other blogs. That’s where I found Forest Street Kitchen (also over on the right) and it’s just about the best thing I’ve found in ages. One of her posts concerned making an elegant finger sandwich lunch for many people and needing recipes that would suit so many folks. She said she went to allrecipes.com and got just what she needed. She noted that she looked for recipes with the most stars and the highest number of reviews.

So… I just hopped on over to allrecipes.com and started browsing. Boy! I hit a goldmine for great recipes. In the past week I’ve made two dishes from the site and  BOTH are winners. Today we had Awesome Baked Sea Scallops (pictured here). I’ll be making them many many times in the future. Another recipe I used with great success was Chicken Fried Chicken. It’s just as good warmed up the next day… and the next. I’m 2 for 2.

After running out about 60 recipes from allrecipes.com I decided I had to stop for a while until I tried some of the recipes I’d already collected.  That idea lasted about an hour and I was back at the computer looking up old favorites to see if there was a recipe for whatever came to mind. Almost everything I wanted was there!  Then I started searching by single food items… chicken, tuna, green beans, cream. Now my recipe folder is bulging even more. And the searching continues. Speaking of which… gotta go!