Cooking Day

Today was dedicated to cooking, and absolutely no research. I have recently discovered gojee.com, and I love it. LOVE it. It's a recipe site that suggests recipes for you, based on what you have in your kitchen already, what you are in the mood for, and taking into account the foods you don't like.

Awesome.

There are other sites that do this, and I've tried them before. But they all have fatal flaws - most commonly, the website is painful to list out all the ingredients you already own, and laborious to delete ingredients once you've used them up. And if not that, then the recipes suggested I don't like. For instance - I will never make anything that requires a box brownie mix. Or marshmallow fluff. That's just heresay. And I also don't do casseroles that call for hot dogs or cream-of-anything soup. And on the other extreme, I'm also not going to cook with caviar, liver, duck, or anything on the half-shell. And if it requires smoking a tomato? Not gonna happen. And even if the website manages both of those things, the interface is just ugly.

But gojee? None of those things. Simple, gorgeous, and serves up recipes that I can't wait to make. I die.

Today I was on a tear to use up all the produce in my fridge that is nearing its shelf life - I hate to have good food go bad! So I made:

Nectarine and Fennel Salad
Mustard-Maple Chicken with Quinoa-Cucumber Salad
Chicken Tagine with Fennel, Preserved Lemons, and Green Olives
 - modified, because I only have fresh lemons, and I'm not even sure what a preserved lemon is...
Bread Pudding
 - modified by adding currants, walnuts, and nutmeg

My kitchen smelled wonderful all day. And I have leftovers a-plenty!

Bring on the week. I don't know about research, but I've got the lunches DOWN.