Sunday. A great day and a depressing day all in the same way. It's a great day because all the cares and worries of the week before have faded away. The depressing side becomes the realization that in less than 24 hours one must return to work and the cycle starts all over again.


Today's post is about cooking!

I love to cook. I don't know if I have shared that with you before. I would love to be the kind of person who hosts dinner parties all the time and has people over for cocktails. I don't seem to live that lifestyle at the moment and so the only one enjoying my culinary experiments is me...but that's ok. I enjoy the labour of love regardless.

I have in the past had cupboards full of cookbooks. Cupboards. I went through a phase a number of years back when I was buying sets of cookbooks from Value Village, Salvation Army, yard sales, etc. I wanted/needed more. I could imagine in my mind the meals I would cook and how fun it would be to experiment. Well, things change. I pared down on the number of books in 2005. I narrowed it down to about 2 cupboards full. When I moved North the majority went into storage and I took only a few essential books--Fanny Farmer, the Tryon Christian Friends cookbook and the Taste of Home cookbook. I purchased a couple while living in Nunavut, Indian food and one for the slow cooker. Arriving back in the South and being re-connected with my collection of cookbooks was great--and I decided to start narrowing down again.

I've purged the cookbooks a couple times in the past 18 months and will be doing a bit more today. A couple weekends ago I decided I'd try a recipe each week from one of my cookbooks--best of intentions and all that. I opened up my slow cooker book found a recipe that looked interesting and wrote down the shopping list. It still hasn't made it to the pot. The slow cooker recipes seem to be extremely high in fat and calories. Why would I spend time slaving over a dinner when the fat content is equivalent of a big mac? So the cookbook is headed to the VV box. I'm trying to eat healthy--I'm getting older you know and the fat and calorie count are more important then say 15 years ago.

The cooking spree will begin shortly. This week I am making my Shepards Pie recipe--its my own recipe. I substitute ground lamb for the hamburger--lamb has such a nice flavour and doesn't need fancy spices to give it flavour. I use pureed cauliflower instead of potatoes. I'm not adding peas this time instead I'm going to try a combination of diced carrots and turnip. Yep, Sheppard Pie my way. I'm also making some spaghetti squash today. Also on the menu, Lazy Chicken. It's a recipe from the Christian Friends cookbook--tried and true homemade recipes. I'm stock piling. It's great coming home to ready to eat foods. The meals from today will keep me going for a couple weeks. Can't beat that. The only problem is that I like to cook so much by next Sunday I will want to cook again and not need to. It's probably a good thing I dumped my small deep freeze or I'd end up cooking enough meals for a few months and then they would go to waste.

The cauliflower is calling!