Cooking dinner, take 1!

Having a child has presented me with a new opportunity, a new chance at growth one might say, the chance to expand upon my cooking! The only problem? I hate cooking.

I know, I know. This comes as a huge shock to many of my culinarily driven friends. How on earth could someone hate making something tasty and delightful? See, I'm not that great at it to begin with and I have a husband who is a trained chef, so once we moved in together I said "Sweeeet! No more cooking." I am a survivalist cook you see. When I make something and taste it I have two options. 1) Is it edible? Yes? Then eat on! 2) Is it edible? No? Call for pizza. These options do not fly in my household for the obvious above mentioned reason that why should we settle on merely edible when my husband can whip up something delicious! But I digress.

This has been a great thing for me. Husband cooks food, I clean up kitchen...mumble mumble most of the time, and we both have full bellies of delicious food. There is a basic problem with my husband doing the cooking now, namely, bedtime. I get home from work around 5pm and pick up Kaylee from my mom. Scott usually gets home between 6:30 and 7pm (unless he has to close the store in which case I have dinner at my parents' house and mom cooks!) and then we start Kaylee's bedtime routine around 8.

This leads to hectic nights (for me) when Scott makes dinner. He gets home at 7 so even if he starts dinner right away it's usually not ready to eat until 7:30/7:45, which gives us 15 minutes to shovel in the food before the Bug starts getting tired and cranky. If it's bath night forget about it.

Soooo...I now try to cook dinner as often as possible. I'm also trying to do at least one new recipe a week since my basic cooking repetoire is mac and cheese, mac and cheese, oh and mac and cheese.

Last night was Spanish Style Rice and Beef ala Rachel Ray. Well, that was the plan at least. Except after I started cooking I realized that I did not have the following ingredients : peppers, cumin, garlic, jalopeno, tortilla chips, cloves, olives, or cilantro. You know, half the recipe? So I modified a bit. Here is what I did.

Mix together 3C water with 2 tbs beef boillion paste and 1 tsp evoo. Add to rice cooker. Add 1 1/2 C Jasmine Rice (you should probably use white but that's all I had). Turn on rice cooker (LOVE my rice cooker btw. Rival brand in bright red like all of our Target kitchen stuff)

Whisk together (in a separate bowl, NOT the rice cooker) 2 cups Hunt's Tomato Sauce, 2 tbs Worcestershire sauce, 1 tsp evoo, 1/8 c dried parsley, 1/8 c oregano, 3 dashes of chili powder, 3 dashed garlic powder. Set aside (for now)

Dice 2 small onions and sauce in evoo. Add ground beef and brown.

Dump sauce bowl contents into pan with onion and beef and heat.

Make a pretty little rice mound (after it's cooked of course) on the plate and add the saucey beef on top.

It was actually fairly delicious and I was quite pleased with myself. My husband also added a little grated Parmesan cheese to his because everything tastes well with Parmesan cheese.