Working On A Quirky Graph

Cooking is something I’ve always enjoyed doing. Most times it is a reliable form of self fulfilment. Generally, especially for someone is not aspiring to chef status, home cooked meals are relatively easy (for me), throw some garlic at a pasta dish and cover in cheese and life is golden. My chili recipe changes each time I make it, my base crockpot chicken with a cream cheese and mushroom sauce is so simple it literally makes itself.

Cooking for others, generally I limit to tried and true recipes, my mac and cheese, chili, and cookies. I am always amused when people request meals from me like I have some inner chef waiting to be unleashed on my kitchen. Trust me when I tell you that my cooking genes are relegated to easy dishes that are not necessarily healthy, probably use more butter and cheese than is necessary and probably carb loaded. In fact, my go to at the moment is scrambled eggs with an avocado hot salsa for breakfast and egg noodles for dinner. Simple. Satisfying. Easy to make.

All of this is a delicious irony as I am trying to cook for my sick cat, Ginger. She has been increasingly picky about what she wants to eat and I’ve hit my limit on how much I want to spend and throw away on canned food. She’s already pretty peeved at me for the medicine I keep dropping on her ears to help her thyroid. So, instead of throwing up my hands, or continually dropping money on food she won’t eat, I’ve decided to research how to make pate for my cat! Yeah, it is less exciting than it sounds…

I went with a basic recipe for stew, chicken based with sweet potatoes and corn, but lots of bone broth to be able to move it to more of a liquid state. Bone broth seems to be the key. I’ve been trying all kinds of gravies to see if I could interest Ginger, but she didn’t want to seem to try them. After throwing a couple of cups into the crockpot with the chicken thighs, it gave it a nice bland flavor.

However, with a little cheese on top, Ginger seemed to be pretty into it. I think there is more that I can do to it to make it more palatable, because, honestly that was the pretty awful for me to even taste, but the bigger deal is trying to find something for my girl to set her gums around. She did leave the noodles though, so I’m not sure what we will do about that. Maybe they need to be ground up as well.

Cooking itself is fairly therapeutic for me. There shouldn’t be a lot of trauma or stress when cooking at home. I’m not going to pretend I have any idea what it is like to cook on a professional level, especially when you have customers and employees all relying on you not only to make something palatable, but a product that will drive people to come back over and over again. Luckily I only have the one person to really appease in this house so I’m not as concerned about the reviews. However, with a new year and a new job that will be changing the way I move (mainly sitting), I’m working on making small changes that will be healthier. More water as a start. 64 ounces of water seems like a ridiculous amount, but I’ve been trying to keep it up, slamming 28 ounces first thing in the morning, and trying for another 20 ounces before I go to work. I can usually catch around 30 ounces at work as well, but I worry about missing that number sometimes. It will be several days before I know if I’ve started a new water habit, but I’m going to try.

The other habit I’m trying is to incorporate more vegetables in my diet. While I know fresh is best, I’m also not a fool and realize most of that will go to waste. Frozen seems to be the way to go, but the plastic waste is almost as bad. If I can start up this habit, steaming my veggies and tossing them in my pasta, hopefully I can get used to the extra steps of cooking and graduate to fresh, figuring out the best way to prepare so they aren’t all limp all the time and begin to minimize the waste I’m personally accruing by using plastic bags.

Start small tho. First, find food for the cat that she will eat on a regular basis, then graduate to the adult in the house. Baby steps in fixing myself and then my footprint on the planet.