Food: Learning to cook – recipes from the simple to the complicated

I'm starting to get the hang of this cooking thing ... or at least I'm trying to. I've never been a great cook. I can follow recipes, but I usually skip anything that isn't as simple as "throw the ingredients in a bowl, stir, and toss in the oven." At any rate, here are three recipes I've done in the past month or so that I considered a success - for me.

Last night I made baked spaghetti with marinara sauce, chicken and broccoli. The simple dish was inspired by a baked spaghetti dish I made on a whim a few weeks ago; that version was complemented by ground beef and mushrooms. And it was much more flavorful than my chicken version. My husband agreed. Another difference this time around: I used a mix of Italian cheeses, while with the ground beef version I used just plain old mozzarella.

I started with wine. I am a firm believer in drinking wine while cooking. This is one of my favorite value (read: cheap) wines. It's organic, full of body and delicious. I highly recommend it. Just $8.99 for a bottle of Castano at our local wine shop.
 

I used cooked angel hair pasta, mixed it with cooked chicken, marinara and broccoli and smothered them with cheese, baking at 350 degrees for 20 minutes. Looking back, I would have skipped the broccoli. I believe chicken and broccoli go best with cream sauces. Unfortunately for me, cream sauces don't go well with healthy eating.

This looks like an ad. But it's not. I've tried many canned non-organic marinara sauces. I am picky, but I love this one - Bertolli Marinara with Burgundy Wine Sauce. So I wanted to share.

And the finished product. Melted cheese is the best, isn't it?

Here are some much more complicated recipes I've tried recently. Both were outside my comfort zone, so I was quite proud when they turned out well.

Recipe: Turkey Lasagna with Butternut Squash, Zucchini and Spinach
This took longer than I expected it to, but the result was wonderful. I would never have guessed butternut squash would taste so great in a lasagna with red sauce. Here is a picture of the lasagna in progress in my somewhat tight and disorganized space for cooking. I anticipate I'll get better at organizing the ingredients one day ...

Recipe: Chocolate Cupcakes with Salted Caramel Frosting
Sounds fancy, right? Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a baker. I can follow a recipe for most things. But when it comes to baking I always mess something up. I put too much salt or baking soda in, or I forget to account for elevation when I'm counting out cups of flour. My chocolate chip cookies generally end up flat. At least chocolate chip cookies taste good flat or otherwise

Inspired by a co-worker who loves the Cupcake Blog  and brought in amazing Chai Spice cupcakes to the office, I embarked a few weeks ago on trying my hand at making cupcakes from scratch - a first for me. I settled on Chocolate Cupcakes with Salted Caramel Frosting. I recommend the recipe that I followed, but take care not to accidentally double it. The blog actually posted the recipe so that you could make a gluten-free and a gluten-full batch of cupcakes. So for the two of us at home, I ended up with 26 cupcakes. My husband got a kick out of that, and both our co-workers appreciated it. My result did not look as pretty as the picture on the above-noted blog, but they still got good reviews. I guess it's hard to go wrong with chocolate and caramel.