I haven’t cooked in a long time, and really didn’t know what I wanted to make. But because it’s the middle of summer, it seemed silly not to cook something that used the seasonal things that are at their best right now. At first, I thought I wanted to make ratatouille, which I have made before but which perhaps wasn’t as tasty as I originally wrote, because I have never been drawn to make it since then. I perused some recipes, and came to the conclusion that what I really wanted to eat was tomatoes and zucchini.

So why didn’t I just make that?

The way my mind treats cooking is not always so simple. I did some online recipe searching, and couldn’t decide between a few recipes that were mostly the same. I read once that the evolution of a cook involves moving from strict recipe-following to looking at recipes and taking aspects but combining them into something new. I’m not about to say that I know what I’m doing in the kitchen by any means, but I will say that I did not use a recipe for dinner tonight, but read a few and gathered information, which I then used bits and pieces of in cooking this meal.

Basically? This was just whole wheat pasta, with tomatoes and zucchini, as I’ve said. I cooked up some garlic, an onion, two zucchini and about two pints of grape and cherry tomatoes (because I still can’t decide which type of tomato I prefer), fresh basil, and some other seasonings. I misjudged the cooking time, so the zucchini was a bit underdone, while the tomatoes were mushy…

But Dan and I ate our first truly home-cooked meal in our new apartment, complete with wine and napkins and real dishes and rolls on the side. I cooked, he did the dishes, and we ate an extremely tasty meal together that we both would like me to cook again. So that’s pretty much a win-win situation. Yay!