The biggest enemy of this project is not time – though I don’t have a whole lot of that – but winter. Winter’s early darkness coupled with my unflattering environmentally friendly lightbulbs makes photographing food a pain in the booty if I decide to cook once I get home from work.

Today I tried to beat the sunset.

No go.

In my efforts to beat the darkness, I picked what could very well have been the worst recipe for empanada dough. Most of the recipes were more pastry based, calling for cold cold butter and rolling the whole mess out and letting it chill in the fridge an hour.

BUT I DIDN’T HAVE AN HOUR!

So I chose a recipe from AllRecipes.com which frankly was too sweet (1/3 cup sugar? Gross), too thick, and… not quite right.

Also? A pain to roll out.

I should have used a bigger glass.

Having seen a recipe in O Magazine for empanadas, I was hell bent on a rotisserie chicken and poblano pepper variation. Poblanos look a bit like infinities when you slice ’em. Pretty.

I chopped up some leftover rotisserie chicken, mixed it with diced poblanos and squished it in the middle of the dough, and crimped it shut with a fork.

Badly lit empanadas are badly lit.

They actually had real potential…with a different dough.

Impatience. It’ll get you ever time.

I haven’t declared the empanada a complete failure but… that dough? Oh. Ew. Gross. NEVER. AGAIN.

Every time I make pasta using sauce from a jar, I chastise myself. It can’t  be that difficult, I think. Plus, can you even pronounce half of the garbage that’s in here? (I’ve taken to buying organic sauce which, yeah, I CAN pronounce the ingredients, but…EVEN SO…)

Pasta sauce is one of those things.

There are very few jarred sauces I like and honestly, I can never remember which ones those are when I go to the store and then I end up buying some garbagey thing that tastes awful and then it just sits in my fridge until it’s so old that the sauce around the rim of the jar is so crusty that I couldn’t take the lid off if I tried.

ANYWAY. That is how pasta sauce ended up on my list (I think I actually wrote “marinara sauce” and I am sure there is some legit difference between marinara and just any old pasta sauce, but I don’t know that difference, and I know what I meant when I wrote the list).

This recipe was pretty darn easy.

(It was also pretty darn boring. Next time? Imma add better stuff)

In a sauce pan, heat up onions and olive oil and salt for about ten minutes (the recipe called for a LOT of olive oil – I reduced it by a lot. I didn’t see the need for so much oil and it seems to have come out okay anyway).

Add two 28-oz cans of San Marzano tomatoes, pureed with their juices.

These are more expensive than just any other whole tomato. And they were in a different section. At my grocery store, there’s a TOMATO section and an AUTHENTIC ITALIAN tomato section. Sooooo… here’s some fancy pants tomatoes. I guess.

Seven basil leaves.

Also: add more salt.

Bring to a bubble on high. Cover and let simmer for about 45 minutes.

In the end, though boring, it was still a win. It’s far too much for me and the girls – I’ve frozen half of the sauce and I’ve packaged up a few separate dishes of pasta and sauce to take to work for lunches this week (I’m going to be so sick of spaghetti). Next time, I’d maybe add more garlic. I keep thinking of elements of things I could add to make this tastier (mmmm pancetta…), but the fact is, I do dig its simplicity, and I do like that if I cut the olive oil down a liiiiiitttttttllllllleeeeee bit further, this is still a relatively healthy sauce and not bogged down by a bunch of junky (and delicious!) extras that make it less healthy.

Short story long, it was a win. The kids liked it. I’ll either halve the recipe next time or just be prepared to freeze in smaller quantities to have sauce on hand…pretty much until the end of time.

Salsa is my favorite condiment.

I could take or leave ketchup. Mustard is a sandwich go-to but sparingly. Mayo is not something I use by choice. But salsa. GLORIOUS SALSA. I could sit down with the jar and a spoon and GO TO TOWN.

Really.

And I dig green salsa too, even though it tends to be a bit spicier and no, it doesn’t really “go” with everything. It’s still good stuff.

You know, I’ve never bought a tomatillo before?

I have no idea if these are good tomatillos. There’s probably a reasonable mechanism for determining the ripeness of a tomatillo. You should google that before you go shopping.

I didn’t.

And shallots.

They hide those suckers at the store. These were on a side of an end cap on a shelf, somewhere near the bottom. In a bag. WAY TO HIDE THE SHALLOTS. That’s okay. I wanted to spend five minutes looking. Honestly, I thought they’d be closer to the onions.

Rude.

So, you’ve got some tomatillos, shallots, cilantro, a jalapeño, green chiles and other stuff (and you know what that other stuff is because UP THERE you clicked the link for the recipe, right? RIGHT). Shove it all in your food processor.

Maybe you chop your stuff into smaller pieces.

I think I made my food processor mad with all these big ol’ veggies.

Pulse, pulse, pulse.

VOILA. Done.

I wasn’t really sure what I’d do with this, but it is amazing served with nachos. Chips, some lovely cheddar and for fun some shredded pork… then dunk in the green salsa.

So full of win.

YUUUUUUUM.

The other night, I had an amazing dinner prepared by people who truly love the process of cooking. While I love watching other people cook (which is why the Food Network appeals to me so much), there’s something amazing about sitting at a counter while food is being prepared, watching people who truly enjoy themselves in the kitchen, preparing a meal that will eventually leave you so full you’ll be grateful for the stretch in your jeans.

When I spoke about cooking, I said as I always do, “I’m not a cook, I bake.”

I make a lot of self-deprecating comments in general about my cooking abilities and how I dislike it but I guess that’s not entirely true.

If I had all the time in the world (or, y’know, a free hour or so) to prepare a meal without twenty other things vying for my attention? I think I’d enjoy it more. Coming home after a long day of work when my children are already hungry and trying to get a meal on the table before hungry turns to “hangry” is less fun. I feel I’m on a race to beat the clock in order to feed the girls (and me!) before tempers flare.

Kind of sucks the joy out of it all, if you must know.

It’s part of the reason I started the Kitchen Through the Lens project in the first place. What I have been finding is that it’s not that I hate cooking, or even that I’m bad at it (quite the contrary, I have made some stuff that I’ve been pretty darn pleased with), it’s that I just want to slow down. I want to cook with enough natural light streaming in my windows that I can take pictures of the food if I want to.

Those were taken with my phone in a kitchen at night before being sauteed with olive oil, leeks and garlic. It was amazing. And how beautiful, right? I want to buy all of the vegetables and take all of the pictures. And then let someone who loves to cook make magic out of them.

I want to feel confident enough in the way that I cook that I move around my kitchen with ease and am not so flustered with the details of the processs that I couldn’t enjoy company sitting with me as I cooked.

I’m not there yet.

I grew up in a house of hurried meals thrown together at the end of the day – well, that is until I got old enough to cook. Then I grew up getting dinner started for my mom to finish throwing something together at the end of the day. Or then I started making dinners to have ready when she got home (never anything fancy, always gross boxed meals – I’m probably still full of preservatives from those years). I certainly had no example of my mom enjoying the process.

Will I ever be a good cook who truly enjoys it? I have no idea. I’m hoping, as the year (and this project) goes on, though, that I gather more confidence and less reluctance to flex my skills in the kitchen.

We’ll see if it happens.

I wasn’t going to do a cooking project this week. I was NOT going to do a cooking project this week. I went to the grocery store Friday afternoon and I didn’t even TAKE A LIST WITH ME DANGIT. I didn’t plan a menu for the week, I had no rhyme or reason to my shopping trip, and I certainly wasn’t going to pick up a ton of ingredients I don’t have on hand already to make something for this project.

Which sounds really grumpy, doesn’t it? I love this project. I love making new stuff. But sometimes you think, “Well… what if I spend $x on super-special ingredient and then I never use it again? THAT WOULD SUCK.”

And then today I felt like garbage and for grins, I googled the recipe for a Dutch baby pancake and behold!

I had all of the ingredients already.

Butter, milk, eggs, flour, salt, powdered sugar.

The recipe called for whole milk. I can’t tell you when I’ve ever had whole milk in my fridge (you drink it with a fork, right?).

I also added a small dash of almond extract to the batter because really? IT MAKES THINGS YUMMIER.

A few minutes of mixing stuff, thirty minutes of baking and voila.

Yum.

This was amazingly easy. Way easier than stupid regular pancakes which are boring.

A squeeze of lemon juice on top, a sprinkling of powdered sugar and this was heavenly.

(The taste actually calls to mind French toast more than an actual pancake, in my opinion)

For the littlest kiddo, I also heated up some sausage to serve along with the pancake and it was a perfect night of breakfast for dinner.

The kids were impressed and hey, I still haven’t missed a week of making somethin’ new.

Let’s see what I can wrangle up next week. I’m thinkin’…tacos. Who’s in?

I knew this food processor would be fun.

As The Princess said the other day when I started getting the ingredients out to make pesto, “How is this thing any different than a blender, really?”

Pfft.

I kind of figured pesto wasn’t that difficult to make – I mean, shoot, the ingredients are simple: basil, pine nuts, garlic, parmesan cheese, olive oil and some salt and pepper (this recipe varies slightly from the one I used – in that it uses Pecorino instead of Parmesan, but, the proportions are the same, so… have at it).

Basically, you toss everything into the food processor, pulse it up nice and pretty and BAM. Done.

I’ll never buy store bought pesto again. Store bought pesto tastes oily and gross and just… too salty. I love having the control over what goes in, how much. And as much as I love garlic, I miiiiiight reduce the garlic next go round.

Yes. That red lid is from the parmesan cheese. I didn’t buy fresh parmesan. I went the lazy way and bought the pre-shredded stuff because I can’t find my cheese grater and I wasn’t sure if the processor would process it or if it would leave cheese clumps and cheese clumps, that doesn’t sound yummy. Well, to me anyway.

Now that you have your pesto, what can you do with it? Obviously, you can put it on pasta.

What did I do with it? I made a basic pizza dough (from scratch. This is one of my favorite uses for my breadmaker – if you are inept with yeast doughs, your breadmaker does the whole thing while you sit on the couch and watch the Michigan/Michigan State game). I rolled the dough onto a pizza pan, spread a thin layer of pesto on it (remember that oil in your pesto? You’re not gonna want a ton on your pizza), threw on some mozzarella and some parmesan cheese (there’s already parm in your pesto also, so think of the saltiness factor when you’re adding it to the toppings), and then sprinkled some browned Italian sausage on top of that. Bake until the dough is not gross and the cheese is nice and golden. Voila. Delish.

Hey. I’m totally learning how to cook. Who’d have thought?

Don’t like pizza? Here are some more ideas for what you can make with your pesto – fifty ideas, to be exact.