I Didn't Know It Was a Phenomenon

I think of myself as a rather adventurous cook. I've been cooking regularly since I was 14 and declared I was going to be a vegetarian. My parents had a fit; I was pretty stubborn; they calmed down; I learned to cook. I borrowed tons of cookbooks from the library and started my recipe collection. I discovered heath food stores and tofu, but, as I didn't drive, had a pretty limited capacity for getting specific ingredients when I wanted them, so I learned to make do. I've been playing "fast and loose" with recipes ever since, using them as guidelines for combinations of quantities, spices, and cooking times.

Since I've been cooking more, that makes Mac nervous. When we moved in together, 10 years ago now, he took over most of the cooking. Recently, I was going to cook fish (which we do occasionally even though it's not strictly vegetarian) but wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it. I was also spending the evening cleaning the fish tank (the irony, no?) and didn't want to do anything complicated. I decided to just toss some canned black beans and diced tomato (w/green chili) over the fish and bake it. That was way outside the box for Mac (but, apparently he thought I was putting spaghetti sauce on the fish). Mac liked it even better than I did. Turns out that all the juice from the beans and tomato makes for very moist and tender fish.

But, back to the phenomenon, Google Cooking. What? The advent of wireless internet has made cooking much easier. I can plug the primary ingredients that I want to cook into a search engine and it spits back dozens (if not hundreds) of possible recipes to choose from. The Washington Post wrote a whole article about this "phenomenon" today. You can see  photos of the carnage from my last foray into Google Cooking. Our vegetable guy gave us two enormous cashew pumpkins so I made huge pots of pumpkin peanut butter and thai pumpkin coconut soups (generally, of course) for a recent potluck - it was a lot of pumpkin.

This morning's article lead me to tofu, cauliflower, peas, and orange for tonight's dinner.