I seem to have lost my cooking-foo. The whole meal / menu-planning doesn't work for me, I can't figure out the big secret. I did stumble on Organizing Junkie's Menu Plan Monday which hopefully give me some inspiration / ideas on how to tackle this.

I did some laundry and cleaning today and paused for drink and food, and then stumbled upon Kay's cheese-onion butterflies and I thought 'oh yes! want those!' so I chopped up my last onion (oops, how can I run out of onions), got the grated Gouda from the fridge, the puff pastry from the freezer and it went completely wrong. It fell apart and I ended up smashing it a bit. It doesn't look very presentable anymore, and I put it in the oven anyway.

Not feeling the cooking-love today.

ETA: They tasted very good. Ate them all. Tummy hurts now...

I came up with a random casserole recipe by just tossing stuff together. I have tons of cans with food from my compulsive food-buying so I just mixed what I thought would work (my cans are mostly 1 person portions):

• 1 small can of brown lentils
• 1 small can of baked beans in tomato-sauce
• half a courgette (zucchini I believe you weird USians call it)
• about 200 grams of baked mushrooms (a leftover, baked in butter and garlic salt, tasty!)
• 1 small can of cream of mushroom soup (at least, I think you call it that, I'd just call it 'creamy mushroom soup')
• two handfuls of grated cheese (ah well, cup, handfuls, who needs exact science!)

I mixed everything together apart from the cheese, put it into oven-dishes, and topped it with cheese. My cans contained about 200 grams of lentils / beans (about 7 US-oz). The soup was a one-person portion, around 230ml / 7.5oz. I don't think the exact amount really matters, the general idea / proportion counts more. I think replacing either the lentils or beans with ground beef/pork will also work pretty well (I want to try a tofu version some time soon).

I just love courgette and mushroom...

I did forget to season it with pepper and salt and herbs, but it tasted pretty good just like this, probably thanks to the soup being already seasoned. I liked the mixture of creamy soup and tomato sauce.

I put it in my toaster-oven for about half an hour on 400°F / 200°C, but it's a toaster-oven, so YMMV.

I ate a tasty portion, put another in my bento for tomorrows lunch and have two portions left for later in the week / freezer. Normally this would make two portions I think. Or maybe one and a half.

My first attempt to cook from my pantry has turned out pretty well. Very pleased :D

Now I have to think of something to cook with my forgotten-but-stil-ok small sweet peppers...

I still have issues eating bread, so I've made a bit of my own (totally abused my rice-cooker for it too!). I like pita-breads, they seem to work well, so I searched for a recipe and found one. I will cut the recipe into 1/3 (this worked pretty well with my previous bread), because 1/4 means too many calculations and weird things (call me lazy ;) ).

I'll still make eight, just eight small ones :D

They'll fit in my bento too!

I've made a few lunches for work, either in my little food-containers or in mr. Bento. It has worked pretty well for bringing my own food along, and making sure I eat enough.

I received my new Laptop Lunchbox which will let me more easily transport my tasty burritos. It turned out smaller than I thought, not a bad thing at all. It looks slightly bigger than a regular lunchbox and has convenient separate containers. From the website I learned most people found too many lids annoying, so they only put one lid on one of the larger containers. I would have liked more lids (but I knew this when I bought it), but I guess worst case, I can order an extra set of inside containers. So far, I like the size, I like that it comes with a spoon and fork and it closes easily.

Hopefully in a couple of days I'll receive my other bento-box, for more food fun.

I went out to the market today and bought veggies, and then purchased panko, chick-pea flower, rice sheets, mirin and sake at the chinese store so I'll have a good base of basic ingredients. I want to make spicy lentil snacks, japanese dry curry and vegetarian cake provençale. Tasty!

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On the lookout for tasty easy snacks to make my life without a stomach a breeze, I happily stumbled over Kay's foodblog. This Dutch Girl Cooking has plenty of tasty and easy to make recipes accompanied by beautiful photography that makes my mouth water.

Now, my photos don't even come close to hers, but check the photo for the results of my attempt to make Pizza muffins! The recipe didn't ask for any weird stuff, I basically had everything. I did replace the pizza sauce with some home made pasta sauce which made them a bit sweeter (next time I'll use pizza sauce, I promise). I made a small batch, liked it, and then realised I had a lot of dough left. I froze it in batches, so now I only have to take one out, put it in a small ovendish and heat up that muffin. The ones on the photo turned out a bit too large for me, I adjusted the frozen batch accordingly. Also, because I don't eat ham I added an extra load of Gouda cheese :)

I don't like sweet stuff very much, and these savoury muffins just make my day.

I wanted Mac 'n' Cheese, because I had never had it before. I looked at recipes online and they all said something else (though they agree it needed 'macaroni' and any type of cheese).

So I decided to make my own recipe with what I had in my cupboards. I used less cheese than most recipes recommended, which worked out very well for me.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup macaroni
• 125 ml cr√®me fra√Æche
• 25 gram parmesan, grated, or flaked (1 oz)
• 50 gram cheddar cheese, chopped (2 oz)
• 25 gram parrano cheese, grated
• tbsp pepper, grounded
• dashes Maggi seasoning sauce

Directions:

Cook macaroni until al dente. While macaroni cookes mix crème fraîche with parmesan, cheddar and pepper, and if desired add a few dashes of Maggi seasoning sauce.

Put macaroni in oven dish and mix in the crème fraîche and cheese. Top it off with parano.

Put in oven for about 30 minutes (or until top becomes golden) on 225° celcius.

(Serves 4)