So I’ve got a new plan!!!

Every week, I’m gonna cook something awesome and new every night!  Five full days of awesomeness!!!  WEEKENDS ARE FOR PIZZA AND BEER!  THEN AFTER THAT I’m gonna save the hell out of my leftovers, and the NEXT WEEK I am going to eat leftovers EVERY night!!!  AND THEN the third week I will cook again!!

Whew.  Now that I’ve got the exclamation marks out of the way, I can get on with…  it.

I’m actually already a week and change into this plan, and it’s going beautifully.  Last week, I made a spinach and mushroom pizza with real homemade crust, black bean soup, coconut curry, eggplant lasagna, a handful of awesome salads, and two loaves of mediocre bread.

What did I learn?  First off, yeast is not something to be feared.  I’d never tried baking bread before, almost entirely because I was intimidated by yeast.  It’s weird- you put some actual real living mushroom inside of your flour and it’s supposed to be good?  Well, yeah.  I did run into a couple problems.  First, making a pizza crust circular IS IMPOSSIBLE, despite all evidence to the contrary.  Second, even after you realize that circular pizza crust is an impossibility, it’s also really hard to get it the proper thickness.  Granted, I don’t have a rolling pin, but I used an empty bottle of really expensive champagne, which has to be just as good, if not better?  Third, it is also impossible to have a consistent, pizza-like edge on the pizza, also despite all evidence to the contrary.  Basically the only thing you can get is a perfectly flat, amoeba-shaped nothing.  Every pizza you’ve ever had was fake.

Next lesson is that making soup is really easy.  It take’s awhile, and I had to clean my knife a lot, but it’s pretty easy.  That was actually the first time I ever made soup, which is weird cause I love soup, but less weird because what I really love is buying Wolfgang Puck’s butternut squash.

I added chickpeas garbanzo beans to the coconut curry because garbanzo beans are awesome  Garbanzo beans pretty much improve whatever they are added to.  In college, I used to take a can of garganzo beans, drain the can of garbanzo beans, mash up the garbanzo beans (or not) an spread the garbanzo beans on bread, covered with mustard.  I love garbanzo beans, so it made a lot of sense to add garbanzo beans to the recipe.

The eggplant lasagna I make all the time, despite its potential for making people deathly ill on account of the huge amount of eggs (2), is good, though time consuming.  Preparing the eggplant is a multi-step process with a lot of waiting, then the lasagna itself takes an hour or so to cook.  Plus, when you freeze the lasagna for later use, it takes another 40 minutes or so to thaw it out.  But it’s absolutely delicious, says me, so that’s cool.  As we speak, I am actually eating the last bit of it.  I thought it would last a little bit longer, but I guess today’s lunch will be the fifth meal I’ve made of it, and I even shared some.

I also made some koala sauce, complete with raisins and cashews, a spinach salad with the requisite mandarin oranges, almond slices, and poppy seed dressing, and on the “Italian” days I had a some simple mixed greens w/ parmesan and some homemade, thus super garlicky, balsamic vinaigrette.  Good stuff.

The loaves of bread I made were good, and as you may have seen last week, actually looked like bread.  I did run into two problems, as expected.  Well, I suppose not really problems, but..  dumbnesses.  The first bread I made was super sweet.  That’s not really my fault as much as the recipe’s, but wasn’t exactly good sandwich fodder.  The second batch came out all goofy. I made enough dough for two loaves, and at the end I divided the dough into two equal parts and put them in their pans.  Great, except forty something minutes later, one of the loaves had risen perfectly, and then other hadn’t risen at all.  Weird.  I never got to the bottom of it, but I’m confident the batter was adequately mixed.  It reminds me of the case of the salty pancakes from Christmas 2009.

SO, if you’ve read this far, THAT means that you are awesome and can do me a favor.  Having just finished the last of the lasagna, and with nothing but a bowl of frozen soup left, what should I do next week?  Anything simple, tasty, vegetarian, and awesome?  Actually, it doesn’t even need to be that simply, but awesome and vegetarian are non-negotiable.