FitFool

I kept seeing this quick recipe in Cooking Light and when I finally made it, I found it was indeed a fast and easy weeknight dinner.



( Click for Recipe for Tortellini in Tomato Broth and a Bigger Picture )

I only like tofu whenever it's been deep fried so there's a slightly crunchy exterior. When it's prepared this way, I eat tofu as if it were a snack food. The deep frying adds back some level of unhealthiness but it tastes good so there I am.

( Click for Recipe and Step-by-step Pictures )

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I love roasting whole chickens. I'll roast two chickens at a time, make a gravy with the giblets, save the bones to make chicken stock, and use the leftovers from the second chicken for easy meals for the rest of the week. This weekend I added a new dish, Shepherd's Pie, to the rotation for using up the leftovers. I adapted a couple of different shepherd's pie recipes I've been seeing online for a while now. It's so tasty and pretty easy to make.

( Recipe and 2 bigger pictures behind cut )

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I remember eating funnel cakes at county fairs, the smell of sugar heavy in the summer air and my fingers sticky with powdered sugar. Turns out it's not too hard to make these at home too.


( Recipe and bigger pictures behind the cut )

I love fries and I love thick-cut wedge fries fresh out of the oven.


( Click to see Recipe and bigger picture )
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I love it when other people cook for me. I was also surprised to find that I enjoyed cooking for other people too (well, once I started making things that were edible). There's something very nourishing and nurturing about it that I hadn't thought would appeal to me. I like hearing the compliments on how it tastes and I like it even more when someone polishes off what's on the plate and glances back at the kitchen, hopefully wondering if there's enough for seconds. Growing up, I had been such a tomboy that I paid little attention to cooking and thought of it as a chore or something that could be replaced by ordering takeout.

As long as I'm rambling, read the short story "A Small, Good Thing" by Raymond Carver. It's a 30-page story in the collection of short stories called Cathedral if you want to read it in printed form. The final page makes me weep every time I read it. There's a line in there where the baker thinks, "It was better to be feeding people." That line's the first time I really thought about how I find it personally satisfying to share home-cooked food.

The other day a friend brought us some lasagna he had made. When he dropped it off, he apologized ahead of time saying he was disappointed that the sausage had had some gristle. I waved off his apologies since he's enough of a food snob that I don't think he would've shared it with us at all if he didn't think it tasted good. It tasted great and I didn't get any gristle in my piece. Gooey delightfulness with the perfect zing in his seasonings. So cheers to my friend and his lasagna and cheers to cooks everywhere!






( Recipe and bigger picture here )
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Michael made this chicken for dinner and the parmesan-crusted chicken skin was divine. I made a side dish of honey-roasted root vegetables that tasted almost like candy since it was so sweet. Plus I wasn't keeping a close eye on it so it got a little burnt but it still tasted good. Both dishes go into a 450F oven so that makes it easier to prepare them together. (I know I've been singing the praises of several recent dishes but we've been having a really good spate of cooking here.)

We usually get boneless, skinless chicken breasts but this time we got the split chicken breasts that were on sale. Tasting them tonight, I don't know why we ever strayed from getting them with the bones and skin. The meat seems more moist and the chicken skin has a great crunch to it. How do you decide whether to use the boneless, skinless chicken breasts or the split chicken breasts?



( Bigger picture and recipe for Split Chicken with Herbs )

( Recipe for Honey-Roasted Root Vegetables )
( The bigger picture so you can see the texture of the crusty skin )
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