Dan and I haven’t cooked anything at home in a while, and when we were writing our grocery list on Saturday morning, we figured that we might as well make a nice dinner since we were making a big trip to the store to replace all of the food we lost during the power outage anyway. We had this amazing marinated chicken at our friends’ place last month, and Dan loved it so much that he’s been asking if we can make it ourselves ever since, so that seemed like the best thing to try.

The marinade (I’m not sure where Jess got it, but it might have been a Moosewood cookbook?) consisted of a jalapeno, garlic, lime juice, cilantro, brown sugar, Worcestershire sauce and a few other things, and wasn’t too difficult to put together. The chicken marinated for about 15 minutes before we cooked it in a pan on the stove (note to self: get a grill pan, asap!). Confession: I haven’t ever cooked chicken this way, and we were trying really hard not to call my mom to ask for advice, just because we really need to start figuring this shit out for ourselves. I got a bit snippy at Dan during the process, just because I feel like I should know this already, and not be so grossed out by raw chicken at the age of thirty.

It worked out fine, and we worked well as a team cooking and cleaning as we went. We cooked three bell peppers in the same pan, and then rolled them into fajitas. It was SO TASTY I can’t even tell you. We couldn’t resist second helpings and didn’t end up with any leftovers at all. All in all? This wasn’t a difficult dinner, and one that we both really enjoyed. Plus? It wasn’t unhealthy, which is pretty huge, too.

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!

I realized recently that I haven’t really been cooking lately. At all. (Looking back – it’s been almost ten weeks!) Granted, there has been a lot going on. But now that things seem to be settling (at least until my birthday and moving this summer, but we’re not talking about that right now), I felt like it was time to get back to trying to cook again. Of course, I picked one of the hottest days of the year for my cooking renaissance. Nice.

Anyway, I wasn’t looking for anything too complicated, and I settled on the Smitten Kitchen’s recipe for Asparagus, Goat Cheese and Lemon Pasta, because it seemed new enough (goat cheese!) but still easy enough for a weeknight dinner. I seem to go through phases with cooking, phases in which I become obsessed with one particular ingredient and only recipes containing said ingredient sound tasty to me. I suppose I could pick worse things than asparagus.

Anyway, it’s still the right time of year to get good asparagus, so I made this for dinner tonight. As per usual, I managed to make more of a mess than might have been strictly necessary, but this came together so quickly and easily! It was creamy but still light, the asparagus was so fresh, and the lemon brightened the whole thing up perfectly. Yum.

(Don’t worry; I didn’t forget Week 22. It’s coming, just later than usual!)

The food supply situation in my apartment reached danger levels over the weekend (no jelly! no string cheese! one more slice of bread! no cranberry juice!), so I used the trip to the grocery story as motivation to actually cook something new, which I haven’t done in a while. I have been wanting to make this recipe found on the Weight Watchers site recently, because I haven’t yet cooked every type of risotto that exists. The recipe had all sorts of tasty-sounding ingredients: asparagus, peas, and lemon. It may not feel like spring outside, but I can force spring in my kitchen.

I only modified the recipe a bit – mostly by adding way more vegetables than they said to use. (I used about a pound and a half of frozen cut asparagus, because the fresh stuff at not-my-usual grocery store looked so sad, and a whole package of frozen peas, rather than a measly cup.) My only complaint about this recipe is due to my own error – it was a bit TOO lemony, but that’s because I went a little overboard when zesting the lemon and didn’t measure what I ended up with; it was most certainly more than the teaspoon that was called for.

But these? These are some leftovers I will look forward to eating (as opposed to that potato stew which is still in my freezer, making me feel guilty).

I had a few days off in the middle of the week this week, and spent them perfecting my relaxation skills. (Translation: I sat on the couch and read two and a half books while Dan played video games. And it was awesome.) However, I wanted to cook for Dan again, both because he was on his third full week out of work after eye surgery, and because I didn’t have any bright ideas for Handmade52 this week. This particular risotto recipe has been at the very top of my food obsessions list (well, food that I make, and that list also includes chili and huevos rancheros), but I haven’t made it in quite a while, and I haven’t ever made it for Dan. Dan doesn’t do cheese, period, so I had to adjust this recipe so he would eat it. (Before you ask, yes, he would be able to taste and object to even a small amount of shredded parmesan cheese baked into something.) Basically, I added a bit more wine, salt, and butter, and omitted the cheese entirely. And really? I didn’t taste the difference. And Dan went back for seconds, so I’d say this was a success.