In the kitchen lately

My wonderful husband has taken an interest in cooking with me the past several weeks (when he's home, that is, which is rare, but still--I'll take it). Last weekend we made a Ukrainian dish called shuba together, so he now has that recipe under his belt. He also surprised me with fresh, homemade mushroom soup on Saturday night when I got home from a day doing whatever I wanted. I was so blissfully happy, though it's such a small thing, just because I've always told him I dream about the day he cooks something for me from scratch. Not frying eggs or heating up leftovers, but really cooking. And he pulled it off. He called my mom and just did it. Amazing. He earned lots of points with me this weekend for sure (we joke about a point system that we redeem in different ways..ahem). Oh, he also made two French apple tarts for company we were having on Sunday evening. That's the only dessert he makes, but I love it!

The weekend before that we made another Ukrainian dish, plov, together Sunday after church. Let me just say, Sunday has improved for me as a day of the week by leaps and bounds recently. Our church services used to be at 1 o'clock, and it split the day up so that we didn't get to do much in the morning since church was coming up, and it didn't feel like we had an evening either because we'd come home at 4 o'clock starving and cranky. We had to skip lunch (and naptime when the kids were younger) and it was almost evening by the time you turned around. Now that we have moved into our new church, our services are at 11 in the morning. I am loooving it. We come home, the sun is still shining bright, and we have all day stretched before us to get things done in the house, spend good family time together, cook, or have friends over in the evening. There is plenty of time to make plans. I am so much happier on Sundays now! I have to add, I am a very cranky person when I get hungry. I don't have the energy to make a meal when I'm starving but I get crankier by the minute as my blood sugar dips. It's kind of funny sometimes. B knows to watch out for it, and if I snap at him and he knows I'm hungry, he'll say, "It's okay, I know you don't mean it...here, have some food."

Anyway, I have enjoyed this change in our routine, but I am still pretty uninspired in the kitchen lately. And eating way too few vegetables as well. Always going back to the same old recipes and same old foods. Thus I am bulking up my recipe binder with lots of new chicken dishes and want to try a few new things that are, well, very new to me (like Asian dumplings). I also visited the Donna Hay website yesterday and picked these six recipes to try soon:

1. artichoke and feta tarts with tomato salad 2. baked mushroom bacon and spinach risotto 3. asparagus and ricotta tarts 4. baked garlic mushrooms 5. char-grilled lemon spinach feta pizzas 6. chicken and roasted zucchini fettuccine 

I guess Donna is like Martha Stewart here in the US? Except that she's in Australia, and I'm going to have to convert every ingredient from grams to cups before I can attempt any of these. That's okay, let the cooking begin!

xoxo,
Tanya