The First Sunday and Soyrizo

"Dang, this actually tastes like real food,"  is my first reaction to the Garden Lasagna I made tonight as my dinner-of-the-week.  I used this delicious recipe from The Interweb (http://lowcaloriecooking.about.com/od/vegetarian/r/veglasagna.htm) and it turned out pretty well!  For the sauce, I bought a bottle Emeril's Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaarlic something or other.  This recipe, along with the Chicken Stew I made for lunch-of-the-week (http://recipes.kaboose.com/irish-chicken-stew-with-dumplings.html), required me to buy more vegetables than I've ever bought in my life.  The lasagna was a little runny, but very hearty all-in-all.  The stew is still cooking away.  If I had read the recipe all the way through, instead of being distracted by the delicious memory of dumplings, I would have realized it takes about a million hours to cook.  And I still have to make the dumplings with the "Baking Mix" I bought at HEB.  "Baking Mix," which sounds made up to me, is actually sold under that name, and can be found in a secret back corner of the flour/sugar aisle behind the Bisquik.

A couple notes of advice from today's cooking adventure:

1.  Make sure you have the hardware.  I ended up making the lasagna in two smaller dishes because I didn't have a bigger casserole dish to put it in.  There were also several times where I had to switch from a small saucepan to a bigger one because of #2 below. 
2.  Don't believe the number of servings on the recipe.  Unless they're measuring in elephant servings, both of these recipes make enough food to feed two people for a week (good thing I have a roommate) and require ENORMOUS pans to make. 

Finally, I want to weigh in on the ongoing Soyrizo debate.  Before I started this whole Sunday cooking experiment, I made myself a pretty passable breakfast-for-dinner taco on Friday night using Soyrizo.  I know, who would have thought I'd ever cook with that vegetarian slop or that it actually tastes really good.  Since I moved to the Valley, I've been trying more meat substitutes.  These items were previously banned from my kitchen and the kitchen of everyone else I know because let's face it, Soyrizo and Boca's Spicy Chik'n are beans pretending to be meat and I was just not cool with the trickery of it all.  However, I've discovered that if I manage my expectations, I actually really like some of the veggie options out there.  You can't go into it thinking Chik'n is going to taste like chicken or that it will have the same consistency.  But if you can accept your beans-masquerading-as-meat for what it is, you can live a long, happy, carnivore-but-sometimes-trying-veggie-for-funsies life. 

No More Ketchup

So there I was.  Standing in the staff break room today, a week into my third year of teaching.  Warming up instant oatmeal.  Instant.  Oatmeal.  Behind me, two other teachers sat in front of full Mexican meals they had packed for lunch.  As my stomach was growling how pissed off it was that summer is over, I realized that teaching is just too hard to do on a stomach full of a half a cup of oatmeal.  I'm going to have to become an adult if I want to teach the children.

In my first attempt to force myself into cooking, I decided a week ago not to buy any microwaveable meals (my old lunch/dinner staple).  Instead, I rolled my cart up and down the aisles picking up everything that looked good to me.  You know what I had for dinner last night?  I had Thai peanut sauce marinade on boiled Orzo with some tofu in it.  I have adopted a seven-year-old's approach to cooking: this tastes good, and so does this, I'll put it in a bowl and watch some TV.  What I ate last night for dinner tasted about as good as the ketchup sandwiches I used to make myself every day after school. 

And it's not for lack of good influences that I've ended up like this.  My mom and grandma are INCREDIBLE cooks.  My grandma cooked the best school lunch in the state of South Dakota for decades.  And my mom is even better than her, and thankfully less obsessed with leftovers.  My roommate makes truly delicious vegetarian food, which I previously considered impossible.  My friends Chelsea and Edwin made gnocchi (I don't even really know what that is) from scratch while writing their own cooking blog.  The only reason I even tried out tofu is because my friend Kieley made vegetarian stir fry last week. 

Today marks my admission into the club of Adults Who Know How to Fend for Themselves.  Every Sunday, I'm going to make myself meals for the week and post the results on this blog.  I'll write about my successes, and also admit to my ketchup sandwich failures... should there be any.  So there it is.  Good luck to me.