a long way from buttered noodles...

My (former) roommate Laura is a wonderful cook.  She's the cook for the Crescent City Cafe, a monthly volunteer opportunity I was a part of in New Orleans, and if you go to their facebook page and look at any of the pictures of the food, you'll start salivating.  On any given day, I'd come into the kitchen and see Laura cooking something delicious, usually sans-recipe.  She's not only a great cook; she also loves cooking.


But for me, cooking has always been a thing of necessity, not enjoyment.  It simply doesn't relax me, and I always struggled to find motivation to spend an hour or more cooking something when I was just going to sit by myself in front of the tv or my computer and eat it.  My first year teaching, when I was working ridiculous hours and pretty much ran on adrenaline [and I'd say that adrenaline was 50% Holy Spirit, 50% fear of failing my kids and my job], I picked up fast food on the way home from school multiple times during the week.  [Popeyes, I love you!  Thanks for helping me survive my first few years as a teacher!]  My typical meal those years was mac and cheese [I still have a special spot in my heart for the Kraft boxes that come in the shapes of different cartoon characters] and buttered noodles, with my fanciest meals being the addition of chicken or shrimp mixed in with the noodles.


But when I started dating Cori, things started changing.  We would cook dinner together, and somehow I knew that buttered noodles weren't going to cut it for him.  I gradually improved during our first 6 months dating, and kicked it up another notch when we started talking marriage and the thought of being a wife began playing around in my head.  Now that we're married, I've found that I take real delight in looking for recipes and creating meals that we both really enjoy.  There have been a handful of complete failures, and plenty more that, while tasty, were not ones that we were dying to repeat.  We are slowly but surely forming a list of recipes that we would eat every night if we could:


*Shrimp Roban
*Pork Marsala
*Shrimp and Grits
*Any of the mixes we stocked up on before we moved- jambalaya, shrimp etouffee being my personal faves
*Garlic Parmesan Chicken [recipe from my friend Lisa- super easy and delicious! What really made it a win for Cori was when I added extra parmesan on his and served it over spaghetti and marinara sauce.]
*Emeril's Breakfast Casserole [while Cori definitely enjoys this one, it's me who would eat it all day, every day, if I could]
*Cod saute with citrus bearnaise [We sub tilapia for the cod- we've found that it's cheaper and we personally prefer it.]
*Gnocchi with Shrimp, Asparagus, and Pesto [I take the easy way out and use pre-made pesto.  Also, can you tell I'm obsessed with shrimp?]


Our newest favorite came from this week: Pesto Pizza


We made a few changes on this one- left out the olives since neither of us are big fans, added chicken, and then personalized our sides a bit... Cori used sun dried tomato basil pesto on his,  plus some italian cheeses and mozzarella.  He also added sun dried tomatoes and pepperoni.


You'll notice that all the recipes are fairly simple- I tend to search under categories like, "15 to 30 minutes or less"- although they always take me twice as long as that!  But I'm certainly a far cry away from the girl who survived on buttered noodles and Popeyes! :)