With all of February’s sickness and subsequent lack of home cooking, I extended Mad Hungry as my cookbook of choice into March. That was a good decision, because the extra month allowed me to get to most of the recipes I wanted to try.

I really loved Mad Hungry. Everything I made was delicious, and almost all the recipes were on the easy side of things. Lucinda really streamlines her approach, removing a lot of unnecessary steps which cut down on ingredients and time. A few dishes were bland, but it wasn’t hard to up the seasoning to move them into the delicious category. I suspected this was true when I first read the book, but now I know it is – this book is best suited for a meat eating family. There are plenty of vegetarian recipes and vegetable side dishes, but there aren’t many vegetarian main dishes. When compiling my list of tried recipes, I realized I didn’t cook much from the breakfast and dessert chapters, probably because I already have plenty of successful and easy go-to breakfast and dessert items. Almost all the recipes below are from the lunch and dinner sections.

Here’s the laundry list with my notes:

• Aunt Patty’s Coffee Cake (not too sweet, be sure to put it in the freezer like Lucinda recommends)
• Savory Chicken Pocket Pies (one of our favorites from the book and so easy to make with leftover chicken, double or triple the recipe and freeze the extras for easy meals)
• Beef Empanadas (very yummy, due to lack of time I made this as a big pie with a top and bottom crust and it worked out well)
• Cream Cheese Pastry (simple, tasty, and easy to roll out – pastry can’t get much better than this!)
• Chicken Salad (a little bland though Lucinda calls it a straightforward rendition, I added fresh herbs and some dijon mustard for oomph)
• Chicken Soup and Rice (I really enjoyed this when I had the flu and was able to put it together in minutes from my freezer stash stock, shredded chicken, and rice)
• Rose’s Vinaigrette (I always have some in my fridge now for easy salads)
• Chicken and Dumplings (good though a little on the bland side, best to make dumplings in the amount you will eat that night as the leftover ones fall apart in the following days)
• Chicken Parmesan (one of my favorite recipes, I love how Lucinda doesn’t have you dredge the chicken in flour and egg before the breadcrumbs and it doesn’t matter at all – from now on I will never dredge chicken in flour and egg)
• Grilled Hanger Streak (good though probably better grilled than broiled which I did)
• Basic Beef Stew (very good but takes about 5 hours start to finish for prep and cooking time)
• Pork Chops with Onions and Apples (very good, the apples cook faster than the onions so I start the onions first to get them more caramelized)
• Lasagna (very good, in my version I upped the seasoning, cut down on the ricotta, and added leftover creamed spinach, I also made my own ricotta which is probably the easiest thing ever)
• Basic Italian Tomato Sauce (tasty and easy, the basis for chicken parmesan and lasagna)
• Spaghetti Carbonara (good though veers towards the bland side so add garlic and herbs)
• Basic White Rice (I found this to be a little dry, I always get perfect results with the 2:1 ratio of water to rice so I’m not going to replace it with this 3:2 ratio)
• Italian Fries (so delicious – some of the fries got too dark and crisp but that was okay because I nibbled on those in the kitchen before dinner and couldn’t stop until every last overcooked one was gone, does takes a while to prepare)
• Spiced Sweet Potato Wedges (good and spicy, I leave off the spices from some wedges for the children)
• Creamed Spinach (good and very fast to make with thawed frozen spinach, leftovers are great in lasagna)
• Tessy’s Banana Bread (good and easy, a fluffier type of banana bread, double the recipe because one loaf disappears too quickly)

What I didn’t get a chance to cook that I desperately want to:

• Spinach Feta Pocket Pies
• Lentil Vegetable Soup
• Chicken Enchiladas Salsa Verde
• Oven Braised Short Ribs
• Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

I’m going to cook from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters over the next two months, but hopefully I can sneak these recipes in somewhere.

While I’m happy the first few months of the cooking challenge were a success in bringing tasty food to my table, the bigger success was finding a new rhythm for grocery shopping and cooking. I don’t work on Mondays, so Mondays are now devoted to food shopping, baking, and preparing ingredients and/or meals for the coming week. It’s been nice to have this routine, and the whole week has been easier for me, especially in the afternoons. I like my afternoons to be full of outdoors time, homework, violin practice, books, and not cooking. In fact the times when my Monday routine was disrupted due to snow or sickness or an appointment, the whole week felt off and I was stressed out. It made me see new importance in the old rhyme “Wash on Monday, Iron on Tuesday, Bake on Wednesday, Brew on Thursday, Churn on Friday, Mend on Saturday, Go to meeting on Sunday.” Starting in the Fall, Agnes will be at school 5 days a week, but I’m going to keep Mondays for myself as feeding-the-family day.

One task for my year of the home is to learn to love cooking again. I make almost all our meals, but I haven’t really enjoyed it in a while. This is a sad fact of motherhood. The simpliest food related tasks now take 3 times as long as they should, as I have to help with homework, break up fights, find something the children can’t locate, etc., etc., all while trying to read a recipe, chop onions, and try not burn what is on the stove or in the oven. To counteract this annoyance, the children are going to help with the cooking more (if they are helping me they can’t fight with each other, right?), and I’m going to do a lot more cooking on my days off when only one child is at home. I grocery shop on Monday mornings, so it makes sense to prepare a lot of the week’s food or ingredients on the same day.

During this year, I’m also going to cook from specific cookbooks over a longish period of time. I’ve thought about the cookbooks I want to use and this is the current short list: Mad Hungry by Lucinda Scala Quinn, The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters, Falling Cloudberries and Apples for Jam by Tessa Kiros, Canal House Cooking (to which I’m about to subscribe), and maybe some of the newer Ina Garten books. I’m sure I’ll still make old favorites and try new recipes from blogs and the internet, but the main feeding will come from these books.

First up and very appropriate for the winter months is Mad Hungry. My parents-in-law gave me the book for my birthday in November, but due to it being backordered it just came into my hands. Last week I read it cover to cover and made the chicken pocket pies (which Stephanie wrote about last year on 3191 miles apart).  So far I love the cookbook, and if the rest of the recipes are even half as good as the chicken pocket pies, we are going to be well fed over the next couple months. (A funny story about the chicken pocket pies - When Will came home from work and saw the pockets baking in the oven, he assumed I must have bought them somewhere because they looked too perfect to be made by hand. After he tried a bite, he was really confused because he knew I couldn’t have bought anything that good from a store. He was very happy to learn I made them, but also apologetic because he was afraid he insulted me by thinking I bought them. I didn’t care at all, and just thought the whole thing was funny.)

Besides yummy looking and sounding recipes, Lucinda spends a lot of time writing about how to approach feeding a family, how to grocery shop, and ways to make producing a large amount of food easier.  While I love one pot meals, my children like everything separate on their plate. Most of Lucinda’s meals consist of a meat entree (though there are quite a few veggie ones too) and a vegetable and grain side dish, which is in line with my children’s preferences. She recommends – when it is easy to do so – always cooking twice as much food, as leftovers can be used in another dish or frozen for future ingredients. One of her examples is roasting two chickens side by side for dinner. While one is eaten that night, the meat from the other is shredded, and the carcasses are used to make broth. The leftover meat and broth go into the refrigerator or freezer in small amounts, which makes them easy to use for anything that requires chicken or chicken stock. With Lucinda’s words in my head, I bought two whole chickens this morning and poached them on the stove when I got home. The resulting broth is simmering and reducing right now, and almost all of it will end up in my freezer. I want to make the pocket pies again (doubling the recipe and freezing most of them), but there are several other chicken recipes I’m eyeing like the enchiladas verde. I guess the good thing about making two chickens instead of one is that I don’t have to choose – I have plenty of shredded chicken for both.

Mad Hungry will be my cookbook of choice at least through February, and I will be sure to share all hits and misses (if there are any) at the end of the time.