Watching Sitcoms

Food is my life. That’s gonna be the name of my cooking show, if I ever get a cooking show of my own. Which is doubtful. But if I did, I’d just cook all sorts of different stuff, both good for you and not so good for you. But all good. I just told my husband today, I’m too good of a cook to always cook healthy food. I made a cherry-apricot cobbler for dessert the other night and, on our diet, none of the ingredients would be legal. We are all always on a diet at my house, because we’re all overweight. But then, these days, who isn’t? I mean, am I right?

Anyway, I watch a few different cooking shows, and I never talk about them. One show I love is 30 Minute Meals. OK, Rachael Ray can be a bit much at times, but she’s good and she’s taught me a lot of shortcuts to use that do save time. I generally need more than 30 minutes, but still and all, I do cook faster than I used to, and I think I’ve become an even better cook. I’ve been cooking since I was really young, like 11 or 12 years old, cause it was just me and my mom and she worked really long hours. So I made dinner. At first, it was a lot of macaroni and cheese and stuff like that, but eventually, I learned.

Now, I usually cook with all fresh ingredients (no box mixes for me), and I generally don’t bother following recipes, cause I don’t really need them cramping my style.

Last night, I made this really great pasta dish that we all loved and which was perfectly legal on our eating plan. My husband said it was good enough to entertain with and it was super easy. If you’re interested, I’ll share it, but I warn you, I don’t measure anything.

It was Shrimp and Artichoke Pasta. I chopped and sauteed a small onion and four cloves of garlic in some chicken stock (I make my own, without salt), about a 1/2 cup of white wine, and a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice, and let the onions and garlic get all soft and mellow. I then added some crushed red pepper flake, fresh ground black pepper, parsley (fresh or not), and one can of artichokes (you could probably use frozen, too, but I had a can). I dumped the juice out and rinsed them off, and cut the hearts into quarters, first. Then I cleaned and thickly sliced a small package of white button mushrooms, but any kind would work, and added those. I’m a firm believer in using what I have.

Once all the veggies were looking good, I added some medium sized already cooked shrimp. I get the packages of frozen shrimp from Aldis and keep them in the freezer. Just dump them into a bowl with some cold water and they thaw out within a few minutes. I always de-tail them before adding them to anything I’m cooking, cause I hate having to deal with the tails when I’m eating, but you do what you want. After about 3 minutes, which is all the shrimp really need, I added about 2 or 3 handfuls of grated Parmesan cheese (OK, this is not strictly legal, but its worth it!) to the sauce and it thickened right up.

In the meantime, I had cooked some rice pasta, any kind would work, but we had spaghetti. Then I threw the cooked pasta into the sauce and mixed it all around and we ate. And ate. It was really good and had no salt, wheat or fat.