Sometime in the fall, I used birthday money to buy Well Fed, a paleo cookbook. Even before I’d made any recipes from it, I found it massively helpful in terms of ideas and inspiration, and so I mentioned that I would love to eventually get the sequel to it, Well Fed 2. Since that mention fell during the time that people were thinking about Christmas gifts, eventually came sooner rather than later.
I cooked a few recipes over the Christmas break, but mostly pulled ideas from the books: they both have sections devoted to ideas for quick and simple meals, that aren’t exactly recipes, but merely outlines and suggestions. Now that we are back into Ordinary time, and I need to work on eating really well to completely “recover” from the Christmas season, I’ve decided to take inspiration by cooking my way through the books. Since the books themselves emphasize the importance of making most of your food prep simple, I’m not going for anything ambitious like something new every day. I think I will start out with a goal of trying at least two new things per week, and see how that works.
I had some fresh basil this week that needed to be used, so a few days ago I made Basil-Walnut Pesto. I considered adding back in Parmesan cheese to make it more like “normal” pesto, but it didn’t taste like anything was missing, so I didn’t.
Later I made Scotch Eggs for di
nner. The book has quite a few variations on the recipe, using different seasonings, and different ground meat (lamb or beef instead of pork), but to start with I just followed the original recipe. They were definitely a hit! We also had spaghetti squash for dinner, with the pesto sauce spooned over it. I was hoping for left-overs of that, but it was a hit, too, and vanished very quickly.
