52 Dishes: Dishes 6-9 and a nice try for 10

  

It's been a while. I've slacked on posting. I've been totally unmotivated... but some cooking did happen! Despite the frustrations and some of the pity parties I threw myself, dishes still got made. If that's not an accomplishment and proof of growth for me, sheesh, I don't know what is. ;)

I'm going to start with pictures of my favorite two dishes from around the time I was cooking them. A kale salad with a homemade lemon dressing and some oatmeal "cookies." They weren't really cookies, more like a chewy bar of sorts, but they were decent. 

The chewy bumps as I am now going to call them, came from this recipe. The lemony kale, chickpea and avocado salad was mostly from this recipe. The chewy bumps didn't quite harden like cookies, not that my cookies are hard, just that they aren't chewy bar like... and so they were a little strange. Didn't stop me from eating them though. Super simple, two ingredients to start and add whatever you want after. Not too bad.

The salad was delicious. I like kale a good amount, I always forget.

  

Speaking of kale... this dish was somewhat inspired by this recipe.
The pasta is a rice pasta because I tried going gluten less for a split second. But that's not the issue with my stomach. So I went back to gluten.

And then for a second I left kale and went to arugula... it's too bitter, but this simple dish of pine nuts, arugula and pasta wasn't so bad. Even made myself a little balsamic dressing.










My nice try goes a little like this... I saw a picture of some delicious looking waffles... the blog post about these waffles can be found here. And I thought we had a waffle iron at the house I live in so I came home thinking I would make some gluten free, almond flour waffles. I wanted to be adventurous, and I was trying to be gluten less at that time. First problem... I got almond meal, not almond flour. Second problem... what I thought was a waffle iron was really a tortilla heater/maker. I was not to be complete discouraged (and even briefly thought of making tortilla iron waffles...yeah...) and decided I would just make pancakes with this mixture instead.
I think they would have turned out just fine if it had been almond flour instead of almond meal. They were just a little too... well, mealy...
Honey and maple syrup helped a bit, but unfortunately not enough. So that dish was one that just did not happen really. Am I going to count it? Yes...yes I am. I tried it and persevered through problems. It counts.


It's probably not hard to tell, I don't really stick exactly to recipes. I have been making stuff I want to learn how to make and getting a little creative along the way. Sometimes it works... sometimes it just falls a little flat. But I will say that I'm trying and learning and that's what the purpose of the project was. That and eating at home more.
So far, pretty good.

xoxo