Cooking Dinner

I really struggle with cooking. I come from a family of gourmets. My mother is a fantastic cook, she can whip up flights of fancy with the simplest ingredients. My father knew how to do incredible things with chile and bacon drippings. Me...not so much.

My family likes to tease me that the firs thing I cooked by myself, at age seven, was an entire box of grits. "Enough to feed an army," they said. Well, I liked me some grits. So there.

After years of being single, I developed a habit of trying new things. Each week, I'd plan my menu and grocery shopping list complete with five days' worth of new recipes. I was always cooking recipes from magazine articles, cookbooks and online recipes. Everything was all new, all the time.

Weird, huh?

How come I never got myself a repetoire, you ask? Well, I suppose being single had something to do with it. Growing up, evening supper was the highlight of our family's day. Everyone gathered 'round the table for an incredible meal and great conversation, some nice music in the background and a bit of candlelight. But as I got older, I really hated dinner time without my family. It was so lonely and dull sitting down to the table by myself. I was either doing the do-see-do with a roommate trying to cook for myself in a shared kitchen, or I was cluttering up a tiny galley in my own apartment. Dinner was utilitarian because it was alone, so I always tried to cheer things up with *new* fancy or elegant new foods. Trying to forget that I was sitting alone at the dinner table eating this stuff.

Now, with just under a year of married life under my belt, I'm trying to develop a repetoire of recipes. Sad, I know. I'm in my mid-thirties and I'm just now starting to figure out what I like to cook and what our family likes to eat. DH isn't terribly picky, and his tastebuds have acclimated nicely to my passion for chile peppers. We both enjoy culinary adventures now and then, but we also both crave some standards, some family favorites, some good ol' fallbacks. I'm working on that now, and I've come up with a whopping 30 family favorites.

We have a ratings system with a 1-10 scale. (10 being the zenith, of course.) DH and I have agreed that a dish has to be at least a 7 to be kept in our repetoire. And the 10's are few and far between. DH doesn't want to give those out willy-nilly, and I am very suspicious when something gets a 10. So we have lots of 8's and 9's, with just a very few 10's.

I'm sharing here what we had for dinner last night, which recently was upgraded from a 9 to a 10 by DH. It's really easy and generates nice lefties for lunch the next day.