Cooker, baker, or neither???

This time of year everyone is baking and making sweet treats to share. I love enjoying the sweet treats, not so much a fan of making them. Not really sure what it is. Maybe it's the preciseness. Everything has to be measured and be exact or you can really screw it up. Maybe it's the time it takes. Maybe it's all the prep. Nothing is ever quick or easy. And there's the mess. No baking project is ever clean.

I much prefer to cook. I am no chef, but I can follow a recipe pretty well. It just seems easier to me.

But I'm sure there are people who look at cooking and feel the same way I feel about baking.

What about you? Do you like one over the other...or do you avoid it all?

I started a Cooking Blog!!!

I have been toying with the idea for a long long time!! I have been cooking healthy meals for my family for years....I find it very thrilling to make something utterly delicious that is guilt-free! This new blog will follow myself and my friend Denise through our adventures in healthy cooking. We'll share TONS of tried and true recipes and welcome recipes suggestions from readers! We'll try those too and then share them!

I have a few musts in a low fat/low cal recipe: it must taste fantastic, it must be relatively easy to make and it must be relatively inexpensive. And our blog will be full of these type of recipes!

I found too, that there are many people out there who want to eat better but just do not know where to start and the term "low fat" scares them to death. So many people have the preconception that low fat means low taste and that is so not true!! Hopefully this blog will give people a starting place!

Come stop by! Healthy Cooking Mamas

Huge disappointment...

I think this story pertains to a lot of things in life. Sometimes no matter what you put into something, no matter how much work or how much you think it is a sure thing... disappointment can still happen.

I prepared a crock pot meal for dinner tonight. I have a great little cookbook that is all low-fat crock pot recipes. Found tons of great meals in that thing!! So when I was preparing my menu for this week and picking out new recipes to try, I perused this book. I found 4 never-tried recipes to add to my list. I decided to use one of them today. My daughter had her first soccer practice at 5:45. No way we could wait till afterward...my son goes to bed at 7:30-8, no way we could be eating dinner at that time. So I decided we'd eat a light lunch and have an early dinner....we had some errands to run before dinner, so crock pot was perfect...it'd be ready to eat when we were.

I followed the recipe to a tee...chopped everything up, put it all in just like it said...and turned it on. It said low for only 3 hours. Sounded a bit funny, but the meat was precooked (turkey kielbasa) so I went with it, against my better judgment. We go out, we run to the stores we needed to go to and returned home. The kids play outside while hubby is doing some yard work. I'm getting things ready for soccer and dinner. 4:30 comes and I check on the food....potatoes are hard as a rock. There is no time to make something else. I leave it on, we get ready and leave the house and do a Mickey D's run and eat it at the park before soccer practice. (If you've never had their Southwest Salad with grilled chicken...yum! Very low in fat!!)

We get home at 7:45 and I check the food. Figured we could save it and eat it tomorrow..or hubby could take it for work...whatever. Um, no. It was the blandest meal I have ever made in my life. Every ounce of flavor from the sausage was removed...not exactly sure how that happened.....and though the potatoes were perfectly cooked....they had zero flavor.

Lesson learned: Go with my gut first of all...if I would have cooked it on high it would have been done. Second..... always be prepared. You never know how things will turn out.