After Luisa and I got married, we found out that we really enjoyed cooking together. Part of it was probably just that both of us really love good food. We probably spend money more often on good food than on many other things...I guess that's just the priorities that we have. But it adds another level when you've cooked the food yourself.
Another cool thing about cooking is that you get to know exactly what is in the food you are putting in your mouth. Now, I have never been a huge health nut. Before I got married, my staple foods in college were probably canned chili, eggs, and cereal (don't worry, I never mixed them together). For me, the important thing was always that as long as it tastes good, it doesn't matter what is in it. I've been really blessed to not have any problems with my weight (Luisa would actually prefer that I put on a few extra pounds) and also been blessed to have a pretty athletic body, without having to pay any special attention to my diet - I probably mostly have my mom to thank for that, though. But I just want to say that I never really cared about how healthy I was eating.
Luisa and I had a lot of conversations about that topic after we got married. She comes from a family that knows a lot about nutrition and where eating healthy is very important. Granted, Germany has a lot less processed and artificially manipulated foods than the US anyway. Part of it was also that the Word of Wisdom talks about eating healthy (for those of you that aren't LDS, the Word of Wisdom is a set of dietary guidelines that we follow; most people know about how Mormons don't drink alcohol, smoke, or drink coffee or black tea, but it also give guidelines about eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, and eating meat sparingly, for example. These things weren't as obvious in the 1800s when we believe Joseph Smith received that revelation). So after a little while I guess it started to rub off on me (although I'm not willing to give up my sugary breakfast cereals yet). It's kind of weird to me that a lot of fatty, unhealthy foods just don't taste good to me anymore - recently I couldn't even finish a Costco polish sausage, and today I had trouble finishing a bowl of that Nalley chili that I ate so often in high school and college. I tried a box of Kraft mac and cheese over Christmas break...couldn't finish that either. I'm actually really thankful that Luisa helped me out in this way.
So my point in explaining all that is that it is nice to be able to cook and choose what is in the food I am eating.
I still didn't really realize that I enjoy cooking so much until Luisa got pregnant and almost literally couldn't leave her bed for about three months. In that case it was kind of a choice between starving to death, eating microwavable dinners every day (not much better), grabbing Chinese take-out every day, or getting in the kitchen and cooking. I decided to start cooking and started to really enjoy it. Even after Luisa started feeling better, I didn't stop cooking, I just started cooking with her.
At the beginning of this year I was thinking about what I would like to accomplish this year and thought about wanting to cook a bigger variety of foods, since sometimes we get caught in a rut, eating the same stuff over and over again. Partly inspired by a friend who set a similar goal, I decided that I wanted to try a new recipe every week of the year (this friend also set a goal to read 52 books and finish 52 home projects, but I don't think I would survive that right now).
Since I thought maybe someone else would be interested in the recipes I try, I decided to make this blog to report on which ones worked, what I did to change them a little bit, and what I would do differently the next time. I'm definitely far from being some amazing chef, but I have to say, some of these recipes have turned out dang good. Enjoy!
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