What's Cooking?

Last week I thought I'd do some cooking. Since Jeff's working from home now and we're rarely going out, I thought it would be a good idea to have a few things on hand.

I started with spaghetti sauce. I didn't make as large a batch that I normally do, because I didn't have much room in the freezer and didn't want to have multiple pasta dinners. I got thinly sliced chicken breasts on my last shopping trip, so I'll make chicken parmesan. I think we'll have enough sauce for a side of pasta.

Next I decided on a lentil walnut salad and a curried lentil soup. The salad recipe said the lentils would take 20-25 minutes. My lentils were small, so I knew they wouldn't take as long to cook. I checked them after ten minutes, and they were destroyed. I tossed them. I didn't have enough lentils to make both the salad and the soup, so I chose the soup. After five minutes, half of those lentils had turned to mush. The recipe called for pureeing part of the soup; I pureed all of it and saved the soup. In hindsight, I should have saved the mushed lentils from the salad, but I didn't think of that.

I opened a can of coconut milk for the lentil soup, so I made a variation on a chicken dish from this cookbook.

A few days later I made another soup: two cans of organic pumpkin, a sweet potato, a few carrots and apples, onions, and garlic in a vegetable broth. Normally I wouldn't be making so much soup in mid-April, but it's been cold and rainy lately. Soup's been a good option.

Saturday night was Jeff's turn. He got half a pound of shrimp (my suggestion) and cooked it with andouille sausage, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, onion, and garlic. When Jeff got the shrimp, he also got some cooked lobster. I used some in Sunday's scrambled eggs and then made lobster risotto for dinner. Tonight, it's chicken parmesan. We still have two andouille sausages, so I'll have to think about that for tomorrow.