Playing with my food

I spent the last hour and a half or so reading food blogs. leaving me with a watering mouth and a keen desire to cook something. I cook a lot, but for the most part it tends to be either simple things, like eggs or pasta, or else completely random combinations that happen because something is getting old or I have nothing else to eat. I haven't been making much progress toward exploring new recipes, so when I discovered the "Blog Hop" feature at the Food Blog Blog (my new favorite time waster!) I was immediately seized by the possibilities. And now I have a new game, which will allow me to entertain myself while simultaneously introducing me to new food. It's not an especially creative game, because the essential idea is that, each week, using either the Blog Hop or the traditional "flip to a random page and point" method with either one of my cookbooks or a favorite cooking blog, I will select a new recipe to try. Being a nominally vegetarian college student, I'm going to give myself the freedom to skip past some recipes.

Legitimate reasons to not use a recipe:
-expensive, out of season or difficult to obtain ingredients
-long preparation time
-fancy equipment or preparation required
-meat, unless it looks really really good
-deep frying

Illegitimate reasons:
-ingredients I don't like
-it sounds boring
-fussiness

It's actually harder than it sounds. It took me four attempts to even get a blog I could use (the first was no longer there, the second was devoted entirely to bacon, the third was an Indian food blog in which every recipe I looked at used either dried lentils - too long to prepare - or some other incredibly exotic ingredient. I did bookmark it for future reference, though. The fourth blog didn't even have any recipes.) Finally, I arrived at a blog for New Orleans cuisine. After following the link to the new site, I scrolled around for a while in an attempt to find a recipe that met all my requirements, and rather than move onto something different or compromise one of my prohibitions already, I finally went back to the original blog and followed another link back to a recipe on the new blog: Maque Choux. I don't think eliminating the meat should be a problem (I may add the spices separately, though). I'm going shopping tomorrow and will cook sometime this week.

Also cooking this week: corn bread and delicata squash soup on Wednesday night for our weekly hall snack time; faux samoas; and possibly something with sweet potatoes. Plus probably some easier type of cookies at some point or other.

Now I'm really feeling hungry...