Get a Life Kitchen Vision

Since on any work day my husband was home before I was (sometimes hours before I arrived home) he has done most of our weekday cooking for the last five years.  He is a good cook and has become more adept and more adventuresome but if I was going to be home all day, then it could be my turn to take over more of the cooking. 

I still cooked on weekends and for all major holidays I was in charge of the turkey dinners.  I'm also the baker.  However, both my cooking and my baking had slipped into a narrow selection of recipes or in some cases no recipe at all just the standard way I had always prepared that type of roast. It was actually quite boring!

As part of "vision of my life during retirement" was the goal to bake more and to learn to cook again. It might even be fun as well as useful.  Over the years our taste buds have grown up and we have learned to appreciate a wider variety of foods with new spices and different techniques.  My cooking seemed routine.  The type of cooking I usually did, I found boring. I lose interest and things end up burned.  In fact if something is burned or burnt tasting the kids say, mom must be cooking!  Yet at one time I had loved to bake and try new recipes. 

Moe had started watching the cooking show, Best Recipes Ever (from Canadian Living and CBC) and was PVRing them to share with me.  He watched Gordon Ramsey videos and had mastered the perfect steak.  He found slow cooker recipes online and created delicious pork tenderloin and chicken recipes.  I wanted to catch up.

We ordered the Best Recipes Ever Cookbook from Amazon, I received Better Homes and Garden's Best Comfort Foods as a gift and I brushed off my collection of cookbooks in preparation for the start of my new kitchen adventures in January.  


By chance, I bought a copy of January's Canadian Living.  (I succumbed to the buy 3 magazines for $10 at the Walmart check out counter--I am seldom in Walmart and seldom break down to that cash grab; but it turned out well.) It was a great purchase!!  The first week of January, I tried 3 recipes and two were smash hits and one was going to be great with a little tweak of the spices to our taste.  I ended up with a subscription to Canadian Living.