Stepping Out of the Box

[HappyHiker]

Have you ever felt you bought and cooked the same things over and over again? I've been bored with my own cooking and am challenging myself to buy and prepare something different each week. So far I've made acorn and butternut squash entrees, made an Asian stir-fry with soy-citrus sauce and accompanied by wild rice.

And we ate a papaya--not a fruit I usually purchase. It was great-bursting with flavor.

Who knows what tomorrow may bring--perhaps kohlrabi??

What about you? In a food rut and trying to get out?

[Rosemary]

I tend to cook seasonally and so our foods turn over several times per year. Then as a season winds down I realize I have totally forgotten how I cooked the previous year during the coming season.

I do love to mix up the veggies that come into our house. My daughter has proclaimed rutabaga "oven fries" as "better than french fries!" If anything, I probably cook too many different things - never the same way twice, since I don't often use recipes. It makes me wonder if I'm leaving my daughter without a food tradition.

[SteveinMN]

Never in a rut. There are very few meals I make over and over, and even those usually have some sort of variation to them (for instance, my chicken soup has different vegetables and/or starches and sometimes has an Asian flavor to it, sometimes a Mediterranean flavor to it). There just are too many foods and too many recipes to try! It helps that I'm still trying to figure out what DW likes and doesn't like (she wasn't exposed to that much variety before she met me) and I like to "push the envelope" a little. ;)

[treehugger]

Signing up for a local (very local, some of the farms are in my town), organic produce box to be delivered every other week has "forced" us to eat a varied, seasonal diet. I love it! Prior to this, we were on a very strict grocery budget, so I only bought the vegetables that were on sale at the grocery store each week (which tended to be the same 3 or 4 things over and over).

Kara

ETA, I just realized how my post actually goes against your thread title. I have stepped out of the box by ordering one to be delivered. :)

[HappyHiker]

Love it--out of the box by stepping into the box--sounds like a Buddhist koan to figure out.

I love to cook, but it seems I get brain-fog when I enter the grocery store and robot-like, put the same things in my cart. Today I added bok choy and kiwi fruit..and more papaya