When it comes to baking I usually do not have the time,
or money for ingredients, to experiment and turn the recipes I find into those
of my own creation. With cooking however it is a completely different story.
Rarely do I ever follow a dinner recipe to the letter. Instead I usually find one that looks
delicious and add/remove/edit the ingredients based on what’s currently in my
kitchen, my weekly food budget, and my own personal taste. If I find something
that looks really good but requires a lot of ingredients I don’t have, I
usually pick one or two that will add the biggest wow factor to the meal and
then use ingredients I already have to fill in. I almost never follow the
actual ingredient amounts, choosing instead to put in as much of each as I want
at that particular moment.
Another way I create a meal is by seeing a popular idea,
reviewing a bunch of recipes, and combining the factors of each to what I think
will be good. This is what I did last night when I made zucchini boat pizza. I
first saw this awesome idea on Pintrest (of course!), and have been wanting to
try it for months. Last week, Whole Foods had some gigantic zucchini and I
decided that the upcoming weekend would be the perfect time to try it. I didn’t
have any pizza sauce so I made my own, again taking popular sauce ingredients
(tomato paste, garlic, oregano, basil, red onions, and red pepper flakes) and just
putting in as much as I wanted to serve my purposes. For toppings I went with
sliced yellow summer squash, artichoke hearts, and fire roasted corn, and I
covered it all with rich Gouda cheese from France. The end result made my taste buds smile with deliciousness, the perfect way to end a weekend!
Overall, yesterday was a pretty great day, one with a
confluence of beautiful, simple events that celebrated the art of being alive.
It started off with Faelina. My adorable little kitten loves to show her
affection by giving me sandpaper baths (aka licking) every chance she can
and my morning dreams were brought to a
sudden end when she decided 6:00 am was the perfect moment for this. I would
have been annoyed (I was definitely not ready to wake up), but when I opened my
eyes to see her little face radiating such a perfect sense of joy and happiness I couldn’t help but smile. I went
on cool walk through the Bowdoin quad, and then spent most of the day at home
reading, writing, cleaning, and getting ready for the week ahead of me. At
times I had soft French music playing in the background, at others songs from
the Scottish Highlands. I laughed at the jokes from Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me,
and was awed by stories I heard on Snap Judgment. I did head over to Bradbury
Mountain for a short hike, and loved the quietness of the woods and the music
of the wind through the trees. I wrote letters to friends, watched my favorite
tv show (Once Upon at Time) and lost myself inside the words of “Written in My
Hearts Own Blood” a story so good I’m pretty sure the world will end when it does.
And then of
course, last night was the full moon. My love of the stars is matched only by
my love of the moon and last night’s was magnificent. I couldn’t help but go
out and celebrate it. I hope you all got the chance to as well…
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