Cooking Plans for the Week

It's been a somewhat popular refrain, both on this blog and in my life, for me to remark that "I don't cook enough" or "I really should be cooking more"... and it's true! I blog about most of what I cook, and a quick browse through the archives would show that I'm not cooking more than once or twice a week and I often go through fairly long phases where I'm not really cooking much of anything. Now, since my significant other is a vegetarian, if I'm cooking meat then once or twice a week is fairly decent, since it means I'm eating lots of leftovers... the Chicken and 40 cloves of Garlic, for example, lasted something like 3 or 4 days... but ideally we'd be cooking more often... either together or dishes we would both want to eat.

While I already had a frozen pizza last night, marring my renewed commitment to cooking somewhat... sigh... tonight I'm going to stop by Dave's Fresh Pasta after work and pick up some fresh fettuccine and some frozen ravioli. While I'd like to get into making the pasta myself at some point, I'm not quite ready for that yet. I'll use the fettuccine to make Old Skool Fettuccine Alfredo (no cream - just butter and cheese) tonight, and save the ravioli for when the tomatoes from Anna's mother's garden ripen up enough for another batch of fresh tomato sauce... which may be next week, since I also want to make a batch of Peter Reinhart's pizza dough... alternatively, if the tomatoes are perfectly ripe, then I can just freeze all of the dough for later.

This weekend, when Anna is up for a Mother-Daughter time in Maine, I'm going to try and make Seven Hour Leg of Lamb from the latest issue of Saveur. This is an example of my ideal recipe... slow cooking a hunk of meat to serve with stewed beans. In addition, seven hours of braising and basting is also the perfect excuse to play video games all day... so win-win!

Too ambitious? We'll see... at least I've blogged about it, so I'm commited to trying. I would guess the leg of lamb is going to be the hardest to obtain, but I never cook lamb so maybe it's all over the place and I'm just not aware... presumably Savenor's will have it if standard stores fail me.

photo by flickr user Herman Saksono used under a Creative Commons license