Learning to cook

You’d think that a woman about to become eligible for Medicare would have learned how to cook by now, wouldn’t you? I present myself as the exception to the rule. Of course, there are a few dishes I can make to keep us from starving but I never really learned how to cook.

Until now. Meet my teacher.

This is so much more than a recipe book. It taught me how to prepare to cook. And it’s ready to teach me how to use spices to enhance the flavor of food. Yes, Dave is learning to eat spices beyond salt, pepper, chili powder, and those that go into his pumpkin pies. 🙂

Lesson one for me was “the cookup.” This is where you spend a block of time preparing foods in advance of the actual meal time to make the final preparations easy. Tuesday, Dave and I spent about an hour and a half in our kitchen preparing food for some time to come. At one point in time it looked like this:

The crockpot is full of vegetables with seasoned beef stew meat and a differently seasoned pork roast all being cooked without further assistance. The broiler pan sitting on the stove is full of bacon we just baked in the oven to a perfect level of crispiness. And the counter is being used to prepare a selection of meatzas

“Meatza?”, you ask. Yes, this is a wonderful way of fulfilling our cravings for pizza in a way that does not include the grains I have mostly eliminated from my life.

There are several recipes out on the internet for making meatza but I like Mel’s method best of what we’ve tried so far. You basically pat a half pound of lean ground beef into a pie plate and bake it 10 to 15 minutes.

Then you move it to a baking sheet, add your favorite pizza toppings,

and bake it another 10 to 15 minutes.

We made four of these at the same time. Dave’s is topped with ham, bacon, and pepperoni. Mine is topped with chicken and mushrooms. We will share the one topped with ham and pineapple. And my VERY experimental one is a bacon, ranch, cheddar burger with grape tomatoes. It turned out very well so will likely be a repeat.

In addition to all those cooked foods we have several containers of chopped meats, fruits, and vegetables ready to be used in salads and/or omelets.

So the rest of the week will be reheating, and/or assembling healthful foods whenever hunger strikes. I’m thrilled!

If you want to learn how to do all this go here, http://www.theclothesmakethegirl.com/wellfed/, and buy this book. Be aware that my meals don’t necessarily look like Mel’s meals. For instance, the cheese on our meatzas; you will find no dairy products in this cookbook. I’m OK with that because what you will find is tasty, real food from around the world made so simple even I can do it.

TTYL,

Linda

ps. In spite of skipping one weekly Weight Watcher’s meeting and not tracking everything I ate during the holidays I lost weight again. Down a total of 28.6 pounds so far and moving right along. All while eating things like meatza; yeah!

pps. No disclaimer needed. I bought my book and Mel doesn’t even know I’m writing this blog. I may send her a link to it, though. 🙂