Hello, my name is Betty Crocker.

Lucky for me, my husband does the cooking. He actually enjoys it most nights, unless he's had a long day, or he's cooked nights in a row and just would rather grab something out and make it easy. Well this week I cooked a couple of nights and enjoyed the satisfaction of actually preparing and fixing a meal start to finish. The first night I made a staple of my cooking menu, spaghetti. It's my stand by and it's always simple and ready to go without a lot of effort. I had invited my dad over for dinner and figured it wouldn't be appropriate of me to ask my husband to cook since I had made the plans. The dinner went well, it lit a small spark under me.

The next night I decided to try it again. I wanted to prepare something new and something that I enjoy eating when we were out (which we've been trying to cut back on for budgetary reasons). I figured Chicken Marsala was one of my favorites, with garlic mashed potatoes. Mmmmmm. It was a fun dish to prepare and for the most part tasted pretty good. I felt my chicken toughened up a bit and my recipe was missing a bit of sweetness to it. I think next time I may add some cooking sherry to the wine mixture and see how that changes it. And I'm going to have to work on the garlic mashed potatoes, they needed more flavor. But it was fun to cook. I even appreciated cleaning the kitchen as I went along and do the dishes afterwards, it felt very satisfying.

I do think though that I would not have attempted these meals if I hadn't had those days off of work. It's not possible to get home at 7:30 and fix dinner when bedtime is just a couple of hours away. I really need to start using the ole crockpot, but what recipes can you make that could sit in there for 12 hours??? It has me stumped.

This morning I'm home again and made myself breakfast which I've been pondering over for a week or so now. Whole wheat, blueberry belgian waffles. Mmmmmm. They were wonderful and oh so good. More of baking than cooking in my book, but I still feel proud of myself for the hard work in the kitchen this week.