Sunday Stealing

Linking up with Bev for today's questions.

1.  How often do you make food and eat it? We eat breakfast and dinner at home most days and take our lunches. I usually do some meal prep on Sunday afternoons for the week. I eat either a salad with lean protein or a meat and a couple of veggies for lunch. Mark eats a chunky peanut butter and raisin sandwich for lunch. He only buys one brand of peanut butter right now . . .and no, I'm not receiving payment for sharing this. Skippy has no idea we exist :-)

2.  Do you consider toasting bread, preparing instant noodles, or boiling an egg to be cooking? Why or why not? I’m not sure that toasting bread should be considered cooking but maybe someone with limited skills in the kitchen would consider it so. For some reason, I do think of boiling eggs as cooking. I don't really eat instant noodles - ramen, right? - except in a great slaw recipe and they are simply toasted, not cooked in water.

3.  What’s your favorite dish to make? My favorite food to make is food that people enjoy eating! Seriously! I love to serve a good meal and sit around our dining room table and laugh and talk!!

4.  Cooking or baking: what’s more fun? What’s more difficult? I think I like cooking over baking but as I'm typing those words, I'm not so sure. The things I bake are definitely fun to eat. I tend to follow the recipe when baking and when cooking, I add and change as I go.

5.  Who did most of the cooking in your house when you were growing up? My mom did all of the cooking until she got sick with cancer. She died when I was a sophomore in high school. After that, one of my jobs was to start supper when I came in from school. I was living with my sister and her now ex-husband at the time and I remember him asking me to please make something that didn't have a tomato sauce base - I knew how to make chili and spaghetti and a few other things and evidently was repeating those things over and over. I actually moved back in with my daddy at some point and he had taught himself how to cook several things!

6.  How have you learned the cooking skills that you have? I've learned a lot by trial and error. I cannot begin to tell you how many pans I have burned up over the years. To be honest, I was meal prepping this afternoon and talking to our daughter on the phone . . .and burned the onions I was sautéing. I'm talking about black charred had to throw in the trash can burned!! My mother-in-law has also taught me how to make several things.

7.   Have you ever taken a cooking course? If so, what did you learn? If not, would you like to do one? What would you like to learn? I took Home Ec in middle school - what do they call it now? I think it is something like Family and Consumer Science?? I still remember one of the things we cooked -- I think the name of the recipe was BBQ cups. You browned hamburger meat and probably added BBQ sauce to the meat. You put a canned biscuit in muffin tin and shaped it like a cup. Then you added a little meat to the "cup" and sprinkled cheese on top and popped them in the oven until bubbly. I probably made those for my sister and brother-in-law, too!! I've never taken a cooking class as an adult. A young woman in our church makes gorgeous iced cookies in all sorts of fun shapes and I would love to take a class from her and learn how to decorate those cookies! I have an excellent cookie recipe but my icing skills need assistance.

8.   Have you tried cooking food from another culture? What did you prepare? How was it? We eat Mexican food often. Does that count? Just last night we had nachos made with 99% fat free ground turkey and they were awesome. I've tried to make a few Asian dishes and they taste ok but not like the food from the local restaurant. Hubby loves curry and he has made curry a couple of times. I've made Falafel and it was delicious.

9.   Is it cost-effective to do your own cooking? Can you save money by cooking? I think it is probably more cost effective to cook our meals at home. I will tell you that I spend WAY TOO MUCH on groceries each week but I love having a full pantry and fridge. Unless you eat fast food for lunch, I definitely think it is cheaper to prepare lunch at home and take it to work.

10.  Would you rather do the cooking or do the washing up afterwards? Most of the time, I do the cooking and Mark washes the dishes afterwards. This seems to work well in our empty nest!

11.  Do you use recipes to cook? If so, where do you get the best recipes? Do you get them from friends, family, online, or from cookbooks? I do use recipes but make changes to personalize the food. When we got married in 1984, one of the showers was a recipe shower. I still use some of those recipes. I love PoundDropper's website and use a lot of her recipes. Pre-internet, I had a TON of cookbooks but 6 1/2 years ago when we moved into this house, I gave most of them to the Salvation Army. I have a few I love and I kept those. I use recipes out of this one all of the time. It is recipes from our church members.

12.  Have you ever tried to prepare some food and just totally ruined it? What happened? I made a slaw recipe one time that was just inedible. We threw it away.
13. Do you prefer cooking at home or eating out at a restaurant? Why? I love eating in a restaurant but even pre-covid, we normally eat at home at least 4-5 out of 7 nights.
14. Is cooking a social activity for you? Do you like to do it with other people, or do your prefer to do it alone? I've helped prepare meals at a homeless shelter here in town and it is fun to be in a kitchen with other people. For our meals, I think I prefer to be alone but actually, I don't think I've ever cooked in a group except in a situation like the homeless shelter. 
15. Do you have a lot of cooking equipment? How often do you use it all? Do you have any pieces of equipment that you rarely ever use? I have a decent amount of equipment. We have All Clad pots, pans, and skillets and they are excellent. We have a Williams Sonoma waffle iron that we use often. I have a little food processor and a big one and I use both of them. I have several crockpots and use those A LOT! I have a smaller air fryer and I really like it!! I rarely use my blender and we have a bullet for making smoothies and we rarely use it.

Just FYI, starting on April 1 I will be blogging about food every day for a month (except Sundays). I will start with A and work my way through Z. I'll be linking up with a lot of other people who will be blogging about all sorts of topics from A to Z.