Been a long time, eh?

It looks like early 2008 was the last time I posted anything. There are quite a few reasons as to why I stopped posting, and I won't bore you with them all. Basically, I got really sick (but am all better now), lost my job (but have a great one now), and took on more courses so I could finish my MBA faster (all done now!). With everything that was going on, cooking & baking pretty much fell to the wayside. In all honesty, the majority of my "home cooked meals" were pasta with garlic and maybe a vegetable. Seriously. It was a pretty rough time!

But now that things are looking up again, I've started cooking and baking a lot more. I've also made a vague commitment to start eating more vegetables. I can now say that I will eat spinach and zucchini. I really didn't know what I was missing out on by being so stubborn and refusing to eat these two pretty awesome vegetables. I've also been more willing to vary recipes depending on what I have in my cupboards and not being so afraid of the outcome. Usually what I come up with turns out pretty well, and it's definitely an incentive for coming up with my own things, rather than strictly following a recipe, which I tend to be pretty bad at.

Earlier this week I found a recipe for zucchini and couscous in The Joy of Cooking. I had one zucchini, but not enough couscous, so I substituted in some quinoa. I sliced the zucchini in half, drizzled it with a little olive oil and put some pepper and salt on, and then baked it in a glass baking dish for about 15 minutes. In the meantime, I sauteed an onion and some garlic in olive oil. After the zucchini was lightly browned on the cut side, I scraped out the pulp and put it in the pan with the onion & garlic, added in the quinoa, and then stirred to coat everything with oil. Then I added in a little chicken broth (I made some with a bouillon cube, because the recipe only called for a little and I didn't want to open up a can and not use the whole thing) and simmered everything until the quinoa had absorbed most of the chicken broth. That took maybe 5 minutes.

After that part was done, I toasted some pine nuts, put the zucchini/quinoa/onion mash back in to the hulled out zucchini shell, and then put the toasted pine nuts on top. I liberally sprinkled everything with nutmeg, because I love nutmeg and cannot get enough of it. Then I popped it back in a 350 degree oven for about 15 minutes. Voila, done, time to eat.

It tasted good, but I have a feeling it would have been better with couscous, and also with dried currants, which the recipe called for but I did not have any. All in all, not a bad recipe modification.

More later!