Cooking

As you all know...I absoulutely love to cook! I am always on the hunt for a new recipe that I can try once and tweak to my own liking. Yesterday I had to go to the store after work to get stuff for breakfast and lunches during the week. I started just kind of browsing around until I noticed...and completely forgot...that some products have recipes on the labels or the back of the box. My hunt began through the noodle isle. They had a lot of recipes and each different noodle box has a different recipe. Of course the Lasagna noodle box will have a recipe for...can you guess? That's right...lasagna. But some of the other noodles have different ones. I had never boughten Mostacolli before. There was an awesome recipe on the back and seemed really easy and quick. I bought up the ingredients and headed home. I made the new meal and it was really good. A couple of changes though..... First off I love cheese on things, but this was really really cheesy! Almost too much cheese and not enough sauce. I would add more sauce and cut down on the cheese. The recipe called for Ricotta which is a really thick cheese. That was fine, but then you add an entire bag of Mozarella and Parmesan to that and you are overloaded. Also, Ricotta straight from the refrigerator is not easy to spread like it asks you to do!

I typically don't like to add anything like onions or mushrooms since I don't like them, but I don't think it would have been bad. The spaghetti sauce I used was traditional flavor, so maybe something with a kick would have been better. The only other thing that might have been good to add would be some ground hamburger or ground turkey (browned). Adam liked it and he said to me "even though it is a little over cheesy, don't stop making it". He really liked it and knew if he told me that, I would make it a mission to improve the recipe.

I am an avid watcher of Rachael Ray. I love the "30 minute meal" concept. Honestly though, do you really find that those meals only take you 30 minutes like her? Not really. She is a professional chef. Of course she can peel and cut potatoes in under 5 minutes. For someone who has kids and animals at their feet and begging for attention every night, it doesn't happen that way. I also don't have time to "pre-prep" food when I get home. Maybe once in a great while I will wash up the fruit, but that is about as far as it goes. So, I look for meals that are simple and a lot of the time are mostly cooked in the oven and require little attention. This way it doesn't feel like I am cooking for an hour because the oven is doing all the work. Casseroles are awesome! They are packed with different things and usually only require one ingredient to be cooked on the stove before being thrown together in a casserole baking dish. I really need to write a book!