Cooking Goals

Five recipes I want to learn to make this year

One of the bonuses of losing 40 pounds and maintaining the weigh-loss is that I have learned to make some of my favorite foods from scratch, while saving on calories and sodium and sugar content.

During the first year of my weight-loss journey, I learned to make pizza dough and cinnamon rolls from scratch. Making my own pizza reduces the sodium content to more than 200 mg, and calories are reduced 200-300, depending upon the size of the pizza. My cinnamon rolls have about half the calories of commercial cinnamon rolls, with fewer ingredients and no food dyes. 

Other cooking accomplishments from that first year include Lentil Soup and making seasonings from scratch for tacos, chili and spaghetti. 

Each year of this journey I have been making more of my favorite foods from scratch, but I want to add more. Here is my list for this year:

1. Shepherd's Pie

I love the Shepherd's Pie at Cheesecake Factory and want to make a similar version. I have a recipe, but I'm still a little daunted at the first step: braising the beef. I've never done this, and it requires more time than I usually give to a recipe. This a rollover goal from the past two years, so it's going at the top of my list for this year. I hope to have a picture and a story on meeting this goal soon.

2. Baked Beans

Whenever I make baked beans, I first reach for a can of baked beans and add a few of my own preferred ingredients. This is another of those recipes that requires more prep and cooking time. First of all, I always dread the inspecting part of beans and lentils. You know...spreading a cloth out and dumping the beans and lentils on it and looking for the broken and bad ones to throw away. And then the additional ingredients needed to complete the dish are not always in my pantry. I'm not sure if I would always make them from scratch, but I want to try...at least once.

3. Chicken Tetrizzini/Lasagna

Many years ago as a newlywed, I made chicken tetrazzini...once. Starting with a whole chicken, I spent an entire Saturday working on the laborious task of deboning the chicken and preparing the long list of ingredients for the recipe I was following. By the time it was ready to serve, I was tired of looking at it and too tired to even eat it. I haven't had this dish very often, but always enjoyed it when someone else made it. But I want to try it again. I now have a recipe for Chicken Lasagna, which is very similar, so I will start with it first. 

4. Yeast Rolls

Now that I have learned to make pizza dough and cinnamon rolls, I want to try yeast rolls. I love them. My paternal grandmother made the best yeast rolls I have ever eaten, but she didn't leave a recipe. When I asked my aunts about her yeast rolls, I was told that my grandmother didn't use recipes. She just made up her own recipes. In the past, I have also made yeast breads with good results, so I want to try the rolls. 

5. Popsicles 

Last year, I found a recipe for pineapple coconut popsicles that I wanted to try. But I couldn't find any molds that were made in the USA. Recently, I remembered that I have some ice trays, made in the USA, stored away in a kitchen cabinet. So I plan to use those and make popsicles in a bowl. Who needs a stick to hold them anyway?

I could have added more than five, but I will start with these. 

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