Cooking at home. Smell the burn.

Cooking at home doesn’t have to be like this:  Why I Don’t Cook At Home by the Oatmeal.  It can be, if you are using some French Cuisine Julia Child the Art of Butchering and Cooking Bunnies.  Instead, try these sites for ideas:

• Cooking with Trader Joe’s
• Allrecipes.com
• Tasty Kitchen
• Everyday Food
• Food Network
• Food.com
• Recipe Key

I love these sites for a number of reasons.  First and foremost, they are free and searchable.  You can find the ones you like, add them to your online recipe box, print them out, and gather them into a binder of your favorites.  They range in difficulty (I stick to the categories of EASY and STUPID EASY).  It’s fairly easy to avoid recipes that use processed foods (If the recipe is sponsored by Cambell’s or Kraft, it’s full of processed food).

This week we are having ginger soy chicken, Paula Deen’s vegetable beef soup, curried beef and rice, green chicken enchiladas, grandma’s chicken chardon, baked ziti, and we WERE going to have mustard molasses flank steak.  Having never bought it before, I asked a clerk at the meat case. He directed me to the specialty case.  Umm.  Thanks. I don’t buy meat from the specialty case.  I buy it from this case.  So sizzler steak with something mustard and molasses it is.

Author’s Note:

A few key ingredients are missing from these sites.  In order to cook as “well” as I do, you need a toddler, about three feet high, who alternates between being underfoot, hanging from your pants, and wedging himself between you and the (insert hot dangerous item here).  You also need a husband who when you say “I’m going to go cook dinner,” disappears because he interprets that declaration as “Please go away.  And leave the boy here with me so he can get hurt. Thanks!  Oh and take as long as you need!  LOVE YOU.”   Lastly you need an oven that possess all of the personalities of Sybil with PMS and will randomly choose its own temperature depending not on the setting you give it but its own mood.  I really feel that last one is the most important one in achieving just the right level of burnt.