A couple of recipes - soup and pasta

Well the first one isn't really a recipe. I just took some spaghetti noodles, boiled them, and then sauteed up some onions in Earth Balance and stirred in the noodles with some Organic Basil & Dried Tomato pesto from Rising Sun Farms. Then I tossed in some fresh cut tomato. It was a nice way for me to be able to imagine for a couple of minutes that it was summer.

When it got cloudy and miserable again I tried out making this Mushroom Barley Soup with Fresh Herbs, since I had that thyme and dill left over from making the rosemary dumpling soup. It turned out pretty good I think. But it reminded me of how far I've come in cooking.

The last time I used barley in my cooking was back when I was newly vegan in Hawaii and still had no clue how to cook. For some reason, back then, I didn't seem to realize that I could easily look up amazing recipes on the internet and buy whatever ingredients listed that I didn't have... and also that this was much less risky than trying to make stuff up myself with what I had. I remember boiling barley and then putting almond milk and random herbs in it, trying to make it into a passable soup. It was terrible. Kind of like a really bland but chewy porridge. Also I made a pasta salad where the dressing was mostly ketchup and some kind of oil. This is why you make sure you only try recipes on vegweb as a noobie if there's like a TON of good reviews on that recipe. It actually didn't taste horrible but it was kind of weird....

In any case most of what I cooked back then was just spaghetti with canned sauce, and burritos with canned vegetarian chili and tomatoes in them, sometimes corn too. That was about the extent of my knowledge and it stayed that way for a really unacceptably long time. At some point I finally broke out of it and started experimenting with recipes. I got discouraged a lot of the time when stuff didn't turn out at first. It's really hard when you try for hours to make something delicious and at best it's just kind of "meh". But I didn't give up for long. I'm really grateful to live with a best friend who puts up with my mistakes and encourages me to keep trying. Now I can make stuff that makes people go "wow!" Although that's mostly due to the wonderful recipes at The Post Punk Kitchen, I think I had to hit a learning curve first and start developing a sense of what works and what doesn't in cooking, because up until about half a year ago, I really didn't get it.

So the moral of that story is just keep trying, and it helps if you're getting your recipes from a good source!