This past Friday (October 17), I undertook making chicken vindaloo and spinach saag.

After hours of work, all of it came out absolutely amazing.

I’ll have more details (and recipes) in a future post.

Tonight (Monday, October 20), I decided to go for something simpler, a single-pot “comfort food” meal – mac & cheese with tuna & peas – quick, simple and nourishing. Sometimes I eat it as it comes, tonight I added more extra sharp cheddar cheese and some hot sauce. Other times I’ve used BBQ sauce to give it a more interesting twist.

Again, I’ll have more details and hits in a future post…

          

After finishing the diverse leafy green salad with multiple mix-ins I’d fixed, I was busily programming and forgot that I’d left some homemade meat sauce simmering on the stove. When I got up from my desk to prepare the macaroni main dish I thought I’d heated and left cooling, I found the tomato sauce boiled almost dry, mostly blackened halfway through. Being one game for experimentation and not inclined to throwing away something I’d put a fair amount of work into, I added some water to the pan and stirred the resulting mixture – how bad could it be? Well, it was pretty bad, but not completely horrible: Surely there must be a way to recover this! From the suggestions that were offered, I decided to stir in some butter, honey and cumin powder. A couple of adjustments later I had an interesting kind of barbequed flavor with a hint of Indian cuisine that was actually pretty good: What had started out as likely to be a plain (somewhat boring) bowl of elbows and tomato sauce, and could easily have been discarded as a disaster, turned into a rather new and unique eating adventure.

Recipes are great, but knowing how to cook and not being afraid to try something new can definitely lead to some unexpected palate discoveries!