Juliana Moves

Welcome to The Cookbook Project! The other day I was getting ready to meal plan for the week and was feeling uninspired by the recipes I had saved in my bookmarks. As I wandered around and tried to think of what to make for the following week, I paused to glance at our plethora of cookbooks.

Some of these were wedding gifts, random purchases over the last few years, or just came into our ownership somehow. Regardless, we have plenty and some of been relatively untouched! I decided it would be fun to move down the line and pick one recipe from a new cookbook each week.

So here we are, with a recap of week one! We picked two recipes out of The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.

We went with the garlicky sautéed spinach and pan-roasted mushrooms that we served with chicken sausage. I do not like cooked spinach normally, so we were planning to sub kale for the leafy green.

We ended up going to the farmer’s market that morning and bought some beautiful rainbow chard! The stems looked like Twizzlers. One of the recipes called for fresh thyme, which I normally omit from recipes because I either forget to buy it or don’t care enough to buy it only to use a small amount. T

Fortunately, we’re growing thyme in our little Aerogarden, so I was able to clip some! I love these little herbs and it is so satisfying to use what we’re growing.

I didn’t take a photo of the end products, but I would give the mushrooms a 4/5 stars and the spinach/rainbow chard 2/5. The mushrooms had butter and onion and soy sauce and lemon juice and were cooked so well. The rainbow chard was a little boring in taste and had a similar slimy texture to spinach – which I should’ve known! Oh well. The texture is really what makes me rate that dish so low. It felt like a chore to eat it. LOL.

In summary, it was fun to try new recipes! I usually gravitate towards things I know I’ll like and so I don’t try new things as often as I’d like to. This seems like a good way of trying unique flavor combos and dishes that I would not normally think of.

I will keep you posted!

P.S. I think we are finally get a community garden plot! After three years of being on the wait list. I am so excited!