Cooking

In NY, we ate out or got take out almost every meal! Part of our new lifestyle here in Seattle is that we need to cook more at home.

I am not a great cook but I am trying to learn a bit and enjoy it. I have to be in the mood to do it. I am definitely the kind of person who can specifically follow a very detailed recipe but I need to be told exactly what to do, when to do it, and how to do it! I can't make up anything on my own! Today, I started with several new recipes that I would like to try this week and tried for the first time to actually plan meals ahead of time. (Do people really do that in real life? I am not sure how long that will last!) I went off to the store armed with a great healthy list of ingredients!

I, of course, knew I would get in trouble for photographing in the store. Indeed, this was the second photo I took in the store and I was instantly pounced on by employees who wondered what I was doing and if they could "help me". I always play totally dumb and say something like "Oh, I just thought the produce was so pretty" and I give them a dumb smile. Today I took it even further and asked the man to help me pick out a ripe mango (which totally distracted him from the fact that I had just been shooting)!

I struggled with this one for a long time for such a simple photo - I could never get the color balance quite right because of those strange store lights so in the end I gave up and made it black and white. My favorite part is the little glimpse of the old man in the background.

p.s. I made lasagna tonight and it was just "ok" - need to get a better recipe next time! I took pictures but it looked much worse than it was.