Bad, Janine. Bad, bad bad. I’ve been cooking and experimenting plenty this week, but I haven’t been posting. I habitually have fun in the kitchen, but need to put myself in the frame of mind to measure so I can share. Sorry for the lapse. Rather than bore you with excuses, I will share some snippets from the week. A week of love in the kitchen. A week of finding solace in the kitchen after sitting awkwardly in an office chair click-click-clicking a mouse on an excel spreadsheet for 8+ hours.

I am proud to say that I live in a home where we waste very little food. We have staples that we buy every week, we keep our bread in the freezer and we buy different ingredients with intention to utilize. Our fridge is not so jammed with food that we forget what’s in there. Leftovers are always put into tupperware and either eaten for lunch the next day, or put in the freezer for a later-week treat. I’m also proud to say that I live with a man who brings lunch to work every day. Over the weekend, he’ll cook 1 or 2 ‘meals’ that are for lunches and will stack the freezer with tupperware. Then, when we cook during the week, we’ll make extra so we can switch up our lunches. Working downtown, like we do, it’s so easy to fall into expensive habits.

We made some good stuff this week. I made a really tasty leek and mushroom rosemary saucey experiment and served it with rice for lunches. Rosemary. Talk about Good Stink! Rosemary and mushrooms were meant to be together…of course I think mushrooms go with anything, but yeah.

Another highlight of the week was a sundried tomato pesto gnocchi that my love made. It had mushrooms and carmelized onions in it and it was super tasty and quick to make. Gnocchi is rich, so serve it with a side salad to balance out your plate.

I was feeling really experimental by mid-week, so we made sushi. Sushi is something that I used to make with my Mom often when I was a kid. It is fun because you can pretty much put anything in it and you can make it together, then laugh at your rolling skills. Buttery shiitake mushrooms, avocado, spinach gommae, and lightly sauteed eggplant were the filling we used. YUM!

We had salad on one day, because we were having a special out of town visitor and knew we’d be eating dinner out on Friday (and drinking copious amounts of wine). We usually have salad at least one day per week. We make salad GOOD!

Tonight, I made soup with potato, yam, mushrooms, corn and cilantro. I spiced it with the same kinds of spices I’d put in a chilli (cumin, coriander, paprika, chilli powder, salt, pepper). Instead of using a veggie broth, I rehydrated some porchini mushrooms and used the water as the broth (good tip, as these mushrooms leave behind a pretty tasty mushroomy water without all of the sodium). Store bought veggie broth messes with me because the flavour isn’t anything specific. In my opinion, it makes horrible gravy, and weird tasting soup. I much prefer carmelizing an onion and adding mushroomy water, mushrooms, (and white wine, if it’s handy) and a dash of wine vinegar or balsamic to brighten it up. Someone told me about this product called Better Than Bouillon, but I haven’t tried it yet. I really want to try to make a vegetarian French Onion Soup and would prefer to do it without a simulated beefy bouillon (creepy).

Most of the time, when I make a soup, I pull out my food processor to puree some (if not all) of it. Having some of the vegetables pureed creates a creaminess in the soup without having to actually add cream. If I haven’t said it yet, I love my food processor!!

This isn’t the greatest of posts, but I guess I wanted to show that life still goes on and our tiny kitchen still gets lots of use.

Hope you are having a great weekend. I’ll be sure to pull out my measuring spoons more, so I can share