Finding New Recipes

One of the reasons we've been getting takeaway as much as we have is that I, at least, have gotten bored of the food we've been eating at home.  It's not that it's been bad food at all or that there hasn't been variety in what we've been eating, it's just that it's beginning to feel like we're eating the same stuff for a long time now.  A caveat I should probably add to this is that I don't really like cooking, especially if it takes a very long time or uses a hundred dishes.  This does limit the range of things we cook a little.

I have been looking for recipes that are vegan or at least vegetarian to add to our recipe book. However, most of the recipes I've come across seem to either be about making products that are like meat, such as burgers, or contain ingredients that are kind of pricey and aren't the easiest to find.  This is especially true of most of the vegan cook books I've looked at recently.

So, I'm going to keep searching for recipes online which are relatively quick (around 30 minutes cooking time) and simple, but hopefully lets us try different styles of food from around the world.  Most of the recipes I have come across so far have been Asian and we've been enjoying working our way through those flavours.  However, I think I'll need to do a more specific search to find vegan versions of food from other regions.  It might also be good to go back to the Redwall Cookbook to see what I can bring back from that, I seem to remember us enjoying a few of those recipes.

As well as finding more recipes I also want to see if we can incorporate eating more seasonally into our cooking.  This might be a little tricky and I have to admit I don't even really know what vegetables actually grow when, so that'll require a bit more research (I ended up finding these lovely magnets by Asking for Trouble from Etsy) but hopefully it'll just mean swapping the vegetables in the recipes.  We're doing it to be more sustainable, but I also want to do it so that we can get a better idea about what grows when in case we ever get the chance to grow our own food.  I'm also hoping we can start foraging for some of our food as well and that should give us much more of a connection to what we're eating as well.

I'm also thinking about finding a range of side dishes I can make to add a bit of variety to our lunches and which would allows us to make ourselves a sort of Budha bowl style meal.  I have to admit this might have been slightly inspired by all the kdrama we've been watching recently where they always seem to have yummy looking side dishes with the meals they eat. 

Despite how I feel about cooking I do feel that right now I might have actually given myself more work rather than the less when it comes to cooking.  However, I do think it'll be worth it in the long run as we should enjoy our food a little more and it'll stop us spending so much money on takeaways and eating out which we can then put into our savings.  It'll also teach me more about the other flavours that are out there and that should make my cooking better in the long run, especially when I'm making dishes that are basically me just winging it, which are most of them - I never was very good at following recipes.