I rushed through my 1990s blog cookie recipes at the end of 2012. I wanted to but did not make a single batch of them – that’s why I had almost no photos. Whew, cookie season is over, and I made it through with only virtual cookies!

But even without cookies, I did pack on a few holiday pounds. It’s January and time to eat scantily for a couple months. This is not the time to even think of cookies. The next section of my 1990s blog that I’ll cover is “Main Dishes” and most of them are relatively low-calorie and packed with protein and nutrients. I’ll take us through these recipes slowly, cooking and photographing most of the recipes as I go. I now realize that I already blogged one of these recipes, Chicken Casserole, as a “Favorite”.

The main dishes content in the 1990s blog was short, partly because most of the things I used to cook routinely were done sans recipe. Also, I had just started on that blog/website when, well, I was distracted and my time was spent on a website on an entirely different subject. Life’s like that.

I wrote this for my 1990s blog:

 My collection of main dish recipes is a motley one. Most “main dishes” I cook do not require a recipe, as in cooking a steak and baked potato, hamburgers, fish, etc. Spaghetti is a stand by, as is stir fry, but these don’t require a recipe. Therefore, the recipes that have made their way into this collection are only those that are a bit tough to memorize, those that are a bit more difficult to put together.

“I Was a Weekend Cook”

Yup, that was me. For over thirty years. Sunday would find me making pasta sauce, stroganoffs, stews, chiles, and soups, not to mention yeast and quick breads. I’d cook crepes and rice and pasta and store them in the refrigerator. Many casseroles could be made up to a certain point and then frozen. I’d coat chicken pieces and freeze the whole pan of uncooked chicken in the freezer. These took up a lot of freezer space, so we got a large storage freezer. I used the “timed bake” function of my oven quite often, so that I could come home to the aroma of food cooking and know that dinner would be ready soon, with just a few minutes of last-minute prep. At the time, I thought that many of my methods for the use of freezer and timed bake were unique; I’ll eventually get to these methods and recipes in this blog. I had a few crock pot recipes in my 1990s blog too.

Today my personal recipe documents number in the hundreds of pages. And I get to leisurely cook on weekdays. I’ve come a long ways, baby!