Adventures of a healthy-ish pseudo-foodie

I really need to plant more parsley. This one time, my mom visited and made mushroom barley soup. I'd never had it before (which is weird), and I loved it. And when I tried to recreated it later, with the help of her memory, it just wasn't good. So I hunted down some recipes that didn't take too many ingredients or too much time, but they were bland. Then I found this one , which calls for Marsala or cream sherry. Which made me think of my favorite  mushroom gravy , which has red wine in it, and since I don't have Marsala or cream sherry, I decided red wine would do. It's delicious. It tastes kind of like the soup equivalent of mushroom gravy, especially when I have parsley to add. My modifications from the original recipe, aside from subbing red wine: I increase the amount of barley from the original recipe, because that's my favorite part. To compensate, I increase the amount of stock and also the amount of wine. I use beef stock instead of ...

Pretty oats. I found these on Pinterest while searching for ways to use up zucchini puree, since the baby now LOVES steamed zucchini and I saw no reason to spoon-feed him the zucchini puree that was sitting in our freezer. When I read the super-healthy ingredient list, it sounded like something I would concoct myself, except that if I had concocted it myself it might have been disgusting for a few trial runs, and I trusted that this was a somewhat tested recipe. Sure enough, it turned out exactly how I like it. Not very sweet, but sweet enough to not be disgusting. Not fluffy, but fluffiness is overrated. And it's FULL of healthy stuff. My hope was that the almost-toddler would also like it, since he's sometimes weird about baked goods but he loves oatmeal and banana and zucchini. And indeed, it's a hit! He devoured half of one with his breakfast this morning. They take a teeny bit more effort than I like to put into things these days, but I think it...

Unphotogenic steamy picture of an actually delicious and beautiful meal. I set out to make some kind of seafood etouffee ( Yats  style), but every time I look up etouffee recipes, I am discouraged by the amount of time and butter they require. But then I found  this recipe for seafood creole , and it sounded worth trying. I followed the recipe fairly exactly, except for a few simplifications. It's very similar to  cioppino , except requires more ordinary ingredients (no clam juice or red wine required, though red wine is great to drink with it) and it tastes good over rice, as an alternative to dipping crusty bread into the broth. Not that there's anything wrong with that. And it's spicier, or at least spicy in a different way. I like it. I made it with pacific snapper and shrimp, and it was great. Scallops would also be good, and crawfish would be perfect if I could find good crawfish here. The Recipe: 3/4 tsp oregano 1/2 tsp salt 1 tsp pepper ...