Amidala: the culinary adventures of a domestic goddess.

i am blogging this for the sole purpose of hopefully sticking it out. i do not expect it to be enlightening for anyone else as far as learning how to cook anything, but it might be kind of entertaining if only to laugh at my attempt to overcome my inability to manage to cook real food more than once or twice a week. mostly, i just hope to make it through the week.

my sister sent me a link to a site that is offering a weekly meal plan. i whined to her once about how basically, i have decided that no matter how good my intentions are, the reality of coming up with my own weekly meal plan and finding said recipes and then making sure that i have everything on hand that i will need to make said meals in a semi-timely fashion always eludes me and we end up eating pasta or pizza or anything else that requires no thought and even less prep time. and she came through for me. big time.

the meal plan not only maps out exactly what i need to make for three healthy meals a day, includes links to the recipes so i can find them easily, and has nice little prep-tips to help me with the actual cooking process, it comes complete with a GROCERY LIST! based on my history with my grocery store, this is fantastic. i mean sure, i spent the better part of an hour on saturday morning wandering around ShopRite searching for one can of green chiles and trying to figure out exactly where i might find myself some gouda cheese, but i also walked out of there with a cart full of groceries and a little bit of confidence that what i had in that cart might actually turn into legit meals.

i just hope that i dont need a serrano chile or the pearl barley or some gouda cheese anytime soon, cuz i just could not find any of them...

this morning, i had some whole grain cereal out of a baggie as i drove to work and drank my skim milk out of my new coffee mug cuz i ran out of time to actually make coffee. the apple that i grabbed as my 'fresh fruit with breakfast' turned into my 'morning snack' because i misinterpreted my grocery list and did not buy any snacky kind of nuts that were supposed to be my 'morning snack.' lunch was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole wheat bread, a piece of fresh fruit, and a cup of water. (i felt bad not putting anything more than that in my husbands lunch box this morning so i threw in some pretzel rods too) my afternoon snack (which i ate at lunchtime) was the first real adventure so far - baby carrots dipped in hummus. after the first bite or two, not nearly as awful as i had always imagined hummus to be. good thing too, cuz its slated to be the afternoon snack all week!

dinner tonight is mac and cheese of some sort or another. i think i will use some of the fresh broccoli i bought, but i dont know for sure, cause my printer only printed the second page of the recipe.

all in all, not too tough for the first day.

**update**

anyone wanna guess when the gouda cheese was for? so since i didnt have any, i substituted some colby/jack that i picked up on my way home. i also got to use my magic bullet that i got for christmas: quite possibly the best christmas-present-that-i-thought-i-would-never-like-or-even-use. that thing is awesome!

long story short, i accidentally over-broiled (read: burnt) the top of the mac and cheese, at one point the lime-butter sauce on the corn looked a bit vomit-ish, my kitchen looked like a giant broccoli floret exploded all over it, and i probably called my mom at one point to clarify what was meant by the term "saute" but all in all i think dinner turned out pretty well: