I blame L-Do for my recent urge to cook meals for myself. Ok, it's not entirely her fault. (check out her vegan website link above!!) It's also because I eat out way too much and it's costing me a fortune. So what did I do? I went to the grocery store and bought $100 of groceries. This was last Sunday. I've cooked 4 or 5 meals and I'd like to share some important lessons I've learned.

1. An entire box of pasta makes a comical amount of noodles. Especially for ONE person. Heh. I finally threw out the last 4 servings of that dish because I was so sick of eating Pasta with Procsuitto and Peas.

2. Green Onions are not scallions. They are way too strong to use raw, especially for someone like me who doesn't like onions to begin with.

3. Raw garlic is really, really strong. When mixed with green onions in a food processor, the result is dizzying. I had a French teacher who used to tell us how she would eat so much garlic she could smell it on her skin the next day. Gross. But it's true. Since I made a ton, I was forced to eat it for 3 meals. I now know that I can only handle one or two cloves of garlic in any meal. I might never eat it raw again.

4. Even though they call "Proscuitto Ham" Italian bacon, it is not bacon. No where NEAR bacon. It's stringy, and mushy, and sticky, and frankly, kind of grosses me out. But I still put it in the recipe. I ended up picking most of it back out.

5. Make sure you have all the ingredients for a recipe BEFORE you start cooking.

6. Make sure the ingredients you have are not spoiled, rotten, or old. I learned this the hard way on Sunday night. I bought the ingredients to make 4 meals and a few random side dishes. By Sunday, a week after my shopping spree, my tomatoes were moldy. Great. Also, my celery was rubbery and weird. BUT since I had already started making my soup, I used it anyway.

7. Rubbery, weird celery when used in a soup recipe stays rubbery and weird after it’s cooked. Surprisingly this didn't affect the end result of my Tuscan Bean Soup. It was still tasty!

8. Red cooking wine settles when left undisturbed for 2 years. Not sure if that's a good thing or a normal thing, but I still used it in my soup. I threw it away after.

9. My new knife is sharp. While I was chopping garlic for Linguini with Clams last night, I noticed that I had also diced... a hair. My hair, hopefully, but still. It was in tiny little pieces mixed in with the sticky raw garlic. I started to gag trying to pick it out. Gross. GROSS. I still used the garlic, though. I didn't have time to chop another clove! My pasta water was boiling like crazy and the oil was practically on fire. I had to press on. (Incidentally, this meal turned out the best out of all of them. I only found one stray piece of hair when eating! Sautéed hair. Mmm...)

Here's a question for my readers (all 2 of you): If I'm making a recipe that uses dairy products, like buttermilk (PS - is buttermilk supposed to be lumpy? Because mine was. I used it anyway.) Do you need to be aware of the expiration date AFTER it's in the dish? I made this yummy fruit salad that's mostly cool whip and canned mandarin oranges. It also has buttermilk in it and I made a lot. What if the buttermilk I used was good when I mixed it in, but expires before I eat all of it??

Cooking is hard.