Thursday, January 10, 2013

Crockpot (and Cooking) Conundrum

I love Pinterest.  I've made that pretty clear here.  My favorite thing to do before I cook or go grocery shopping is to hop over to Pinterest and find some recipe inspiration.  I have a huge food pin board.  But lately I've been stuck.  I don't know if it's the cruddy weather or the dark evenings or my total boredom with what we've been eating, but my interest level in cooking has significantly dropped.

So I headed over to Pinterest to find new recipes.  And because my main goal is something easy, I looked for crockpot recipes.  Do you use a crockpot?  I absolutely love mine.  It's so useful for so many things, but when you search anywhere for crockpot recipes, most of them have meat, wheat products, or both.  I have an entire cookbook devoted to the crockpot, and every recipe in the book is meaty and wheaty.  We don't have any of those ingredients in our house.  So my crockpot recipes are pretty limited to beans.  Refried beans, red beans, bean soup, lentil beans - we eat a lot of beans in this house.  And I worry that Nick is getting tired of the beans.

Believe me, I really believe that almost all recipes can be adapted to be meat, wheat, and dairy free.  Coconut milk panna cotta, gluten-free donuts - tonight I'm even making buffalo cauliflower bites.  You know those kids in elementary school whose parents made them bring in salad and quinoa for lunch with a side of water, while you had Capri Suns and Ho-hos?  I'm pretty sure we're becoming those parents.  Because at this point I'm way more interested in baking buffalo cauliflower instead of using my brand-new deep-fryer to make actual buffalo wings. 

Back to my problem.  I don't know what to cook anymore.  And I don't know where to look for healthy recipes, made in the crockpot or conventionally.  I'm starting to feel isolated from my old cooking favorites.  And there are only so many Williams-Sonoma bean, rice, or past dishes that I can make over and over and over again.  Help me friends.  Send me some cooking inspiration.  Or your favorite vegetarian/gluten-free websites.  Otherwise it's baked cauliflower for dinner tonight, and if it's bad, Nick will never let me live that cooking-failure down (or at least try to replace meat with cauliflower).

1 comment:

  1. I can make no comment on the quality or nutritional value of these recipes because I haven't looked at them at all, but a co-worker forwarded me this site a while ago. They eat GF for their daughter. And it's all crockpot. http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/

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