Culinary Adventures

Well, my mission of making a new recipe once a week is going fine, except for the fact that every dinner I have made I wouldn't make again! So far I have made 5 dinners and 1 dessert (the Valentine yummies which you won't be able to stop me from making again- delish!). I am making my 6th dinner tonight (I missed a week when we were in FL).

1.) Lasagne Soup from Cuisine's Splendid Soups. Steve is a vegetarian so I eliminated the Italian sausage from the recipe. That must have been where all the flavor was. It still had some great ingredients in it- spinach, carrots, tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, mozzarella cheese... but it lacked seasoning and flavor.
2.) Chicken Pasta Mexicana from allrecipes.com. I renamed it. It was called chicken macaroni casserole. I tweaked it A LOT. Added salsa, sauteed onions, etc. Steve wanted a Mexican pasta casserole and I couldn't find one in any of my books or on the internet. So I used a base recipe and made it Mexican. I probably would make this again with futher tweaking.
3.) Baked Potato Soup from The Big Book of Soups and Stews. Blach. It was gross. I didn't even finish my bowl. Forget about the leftovers- they went down the drain.
4.) Buffalo Chicken and Potato Casserole from the little book called Casseroles that I got in the checkout lane at the grocery store. The chicken was good. The potatoes never cooked! I had it in there 45 minutes past the original time to try to cook the potatoes. Grrrr. The chicken had a butter and cornflake topping that was good though. The potatoes went in the garbage and the chicken went on a salad.
5.) Macaroni and Cheese from Art Smith's Back to the Table. The cheese never got 'saucy' and it lacked the cheesy flavor that you get from a box of the processed stuff. It said for kids to make it with American and cheddar and for adults you could make it with just cheddar. I will try it again and use American and maybe a different recipe. He is (was? I don't know anymore. He was when I bought the book an eon ago.) the chef for Oprah so I honestly thought it would rock. Very disappointed.

Tonight I am making Spinach Lasagne that I cut out from Cooking Light. We'll see how this turns out. I do have a lasagne recipe that I made up that is fabulous! I always want to make that one instead of trying out a new one. It is definitely one of my signature dishes.

So when a recipe goes awry what do you do with the food? Doesn't it feel like such a waste to just pitch it? One thing I do know- it is getting expensive!