Asha Anujeeva's Attitude

Today I realized that my cooking has gotten into a rut of the same old recipes and the same foods on the menu each night. I am sick of my own cooking!

There are some great shows on cable TV about cooking, so I think it would be a good idea to devote at least one a week to watching a cooking show and expanding my food preparation skills. I also want to expand my knowledge of vegetables. There are so many different fruits and vegetables in the grocery store produce section now. I don’t even know how to prepare and serve half of them! First I need to learn how to select the right one, when is it ripe? Do you peel it or not? Discard the seeds or not? There is so much to learn!

For years I would make a big pot of chicken and dumplings and they always turned out wonderful. It was my “go to” dish for comfort food. I make the chicken by boiling it with onions, then remove the chicken, drain the fat, and cut the meat off the bone and into small pieces. Put it back in the pot with some spices and then make the dumplings. I always make the dumplings with the recipe on the side of the Bisquick box.

I don’t know what has changed, but the last several batches have not turned out well. The dumplings don’t get light and fluffy – they are hard little dough rocks. The food tastes wonderful, but the dumplings keep failing. I have no idea what is wrong and I’m getting very frustrated.

I just bought a bread machine that says that it bakes 1, 1 1/2, and 2 pound loaves of bread. Well, I was really happy about that because my old bread machine that just died wouldn’t go as high as 2 pounds, it would do 1 and 1 1/2 pound loaves.

So today I decided to bake a 2 pound loaf of french bread. It overflowed out of the pan and hit the top of the bread machine. When I lifted the lid up, part of the loaf of bread stuck on the lid. It was really hard to get the bread out of the bread pan because the top of the bread had spilled over the handle of the pan. I had to rip off pieces of the top just to get it out of the pan.

I think I’d best stick to 1 1/2 pound loaves of bread from now on!

My sister has been encouraging me to drink a hot tea every day. Both black teas and green teas have health benefits, mostly an anti-oxidant that helps prevent cancer. She wants me to drink at least one cup, if not two cups, every day.

The green tea has an amino acid in it that produces a boost in your body’s immune system. This has been proven in a recent Harvard sponsored study on interferon contained in the body. In their study, subjects who drank 5 cups of tea every day had 10 times as much interferon in their body than the non-tea drinkers. That is a huge difference and definitely something I should take to heart.

One of the things that I’ve been trying to do lately is to eat a little bit healthier when I get the chance. I’ve been relying too heavily on fast food recently and my body is objecting. I’ve noticed, though, that eating healthy tends to be more expensive.

So that means that I have to look a little bit harder at ways to save money. Looking for the fresh fruit that is marked down because the “use by” date is getting really close is one way that I do that. I’ve never liked buying under-ripe fruit and then having to wait a few days for it to ripen enough to eat it.

So now I look for the fresh fruit mix bowls that are marked down and try to eat them for a snack. I enjoy them because they are sweet, and I have a sweet tooth. The only problem is that I have to eat them about an hour before I plan to eat a “real” meal because eating fruit makes me hungry again really fast! But they are good for a “Gee I’m not really hungry but want to eat something sweet” to satisfy my sweet tooth!