Cooking for newlyweds

I've been having a lot of fun in the kitchen lately.

It all starts at the grocery store. I am slowly improving as a thrifty shopper. Last week I used a calculator and the cashier couldn't get over how little my groceries cost and how much produce I bought. 

But I guess I should also mention that I bought kidney beans instead of black beans. To add insult to injury, I confused them not once but twice at home. I learned that when life hands you kidney beans, you make pasta e fagioli (and salad, and burritos...) 

Tonight I hit the jackpot in the produce section. 

Apples, oranges, grapefruits and bosc pears were all on sale. I found lots of good deals, bought the store brand, resisted the cute displays and behaved until I saw this. 

I like to think that the Bonne Maman is a dumpling of a french woman who makes every batch on an old fashioned stove.  I couldn't bear to pick up the sad looking off-brand raspberry jam.  Score one for the Bonne Maman marketing team, you won me over. I came home armed with my cute preserves and got started on dinner. 

Before I was married, I was a sporadic chef. Sometimes I would get really into a new recipe or try my hand at fondant. There was also a week when I ate nothing but spaghetti-o's. Any cooking I did was from a recipe. I was especially particular to recipes with lots of photos so I could check my work. 

My husband, on the other hand, cooks off the cuff. His specialty is making delicious Sunday brunches out of a seemingly empty fridge.  His skill for improvisation is slowly rubbing off. 

Last week I made a split pea and vegetable curry soup.  I wanted a yummy side so I tried making biscuits. Ok, I know that sounds more like culture clash than creative fusion cuisine, but the combination was not bad. I was surprised to find that I had all the ingredients for a basic biscuit in my cupboards and the whole project only  took twenty minutes. 

On Saturday I made spicy mac and cheese for lunch. The key to the recipe was a simple cream sauce. It was so yummy, I began to think of other uses for the cream sauce. 

Tonight I combined the two new finds and made chicken pot pie with a biscuit crust. 

I shredded a rotisserie chicken, sauteed some onions, celery, and carrots, stirred in some frozen peas and corn and folded it all into a cream sauce with thyme and rosemary. These cheery yellow ramekins belonged to my grandmother and they are the perfect size for a single portion. 

One on the many perks of being a newlywed is that no matter how humble dinner may be, I have pretty tableware to serve it with. 

Dinner is not always like this. I default to black bean burritos more often than I should and we eat a lot of "snack dinners" (like chips and salsa or crackers and cheese.) The only constant is my total disdain for doing the dishes.