In the kitchen

For some reason lately cooking dinner has been annoying. I'm sick of everything that I know how to make, Anderson has made his two dishes, and I don't want to look up recipes. Too much work, too much time. Also, we're trying to eat healthier, cutting out as much processed food as we can. Sooo...we subscribed to The Fresh 20! Basically, this is a meal planning website. For $5 a month, you get 5 recipes a week (classic, vegetarian, or gluten-free), plus a shopping list for each week. The cool thing is that each week's worth of recipes uses only 20 fresh, whole-food ingredients, and then some pantry staples (rice, pasta, etc). So the meals will be really healthy! It's a little intimidating, though, because several of the recipes use ingredients that I rarely or never cook with, like fava beans, eggplant, kale, portabello mushrooms, jicama. Maybe that's not so weird to some of you. I've eaten these things, but they're just not usually on the rotation of things I prepare. I was tempted to pick and choose which recipes I wanted to try, but decided that that would defeat part of the purpose of the subscription in the first place. So I'm going for it, even if it's weird. (We went with the vegetarian meal plan, btw. Cheaper and healthier, and more normal for us, since we cook meat at home less than once a week.)

Yesterday, Day 1, the meal was portabello melts, kale chips, and cantalope. The portabello melts were awesome! Portabellos, avocado, cheese, tomato, onions, on a toasted sandwich. Definitely will make this again. Very simple and good, yet not something I probably would have tried without a recipe. I didn't make the kale chips, though, because we've had them before and didn't really like them. I made edamame instead, for an easy baby-pleaser.

Anyway, point is, if anyone is in a meal rut or looking to eat healthier, I would recommend the Fresh 20! Well, for Day 1, anyway. We'll see how it goes from here! Next meal is Southern Squash Casserole, Tomato Salad, and Fresh Blueberries.