The Challenge of Cooking (anything) when working outside the home (Part I)

I'll admit it...I'm terrible at being motivated to make a mess in the kitchen (and then turn around and clean it up). Being in the kitchen has always been kind of boring, and I'm kind of a picky eater. So I'm less likely to try new recipes which I may not enjoy than old recipes (read: plain and boring) which I know I will like.

I'm a huge fac of grilled chicken. And broiled halibut, swordfish or salmon. But that's about as exotic as I've always been. The problem now is trying to feed my two growing boys without creating picky monsters as well. I tried menu planning, earlier this year. I went to allrecipes.com and recipezaar.com and downloaded several recipes. I tried most of them and found a few favorites. But soon enough, we had fallen back into our rut of frozen pizza once per week, and a few meals planned by standing in front of the freezer door at 6pm. That's when I put my head down in defeat!

I found a recipe for Pizza Pasta, and realized that I had most everything I needed to make it. I was just missing the mushrooms and olives....oh and the pasta was a different kind but it would work. and it wasn't a marinara sauce, but it was a sauce! And I was a little bit short on the mozzarella cheese, but I'd just have it be a half n half pizza. But, at least I had a package of pepperoni in the fridge (which I had bought many moons ago when I had convinced myself I was going to make pizza from scratch.

I made my modified version of pizza pasta and the boys didn't complain (score one for Mama!). I also found a ton of other recipes, easy recipes, cheap recipes, once a month cooking recipes, cooking from scratch, crockpot cooking, etc etc etc. I printed off quite a bit, created a recipe book with sheet protectors.

So this is my first, of many posts I hope. I'll post my menus for each week, and keep my recipes here for reference. I'd also like to use this blog in order to link to the recipes that I find. Sometimes I find something but I don't have time to print it out, and then I can't seem to find it again when I need it.