This week is going to be the first week I attempt to cook for myself. Previously I had been subsisting on microwave meals, desserts, and my creative sandwich attempts. I'm intimidated by this because my more complex (i.e., non-sandwich) cooking attempts tend to go disastrously awry.

I have some recipe books I got because slippyslope talked about them a long time ago: Going Solo in the Kitchen by Jane Doerfer, and Small-Batch Baking by Debby Maugans Nakos (this one is all TINY DESSERTS!), but they have a large selection of foods and every time I open them I am getting OVERWHELMED BY THE CHOICES.

I went to look at the amazon book reviews to see if anyone had recommended any of the recipes as particularly awesome, but there was just general praise and the odd negative comment. What was hilarious was that most of the negative comments were like this:

"I guess the recipes look okay, but they all involved food someone wouldn't have readily on hand unless they were a woman with a fully-stocked kitchen. I'm a man so I don't have any of that and these recipes were useless to me."

Dude. YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG. The way you cook is like this: You pick out what you want to make a little bit in advance. Once you know what you want to make, you write down what you need to make it on this amazing thing called A GROCERY LIST, and then you go to the store and buy the stuff on your list, random things that catch your eye, Batman Battle Fruit-Roll-Ups, and whatever else looks tasty and good. Then you go home and follow the recipe to make a meal. IT IS NOT REALLY A COMPLICATED THING TO DO, OR A GREAT MYSTERY. OR A FEMALE-SPECIFIC THING.

Also, for the record, I know next to nothing about cooking that doesn't involve easily-microwavable foods, and I thought the recipes looked Not Terribly Difficult and involved ingredients I knew the names of, so these commenters were obviously just CRAZY.

ANYWAY. The point of this post is this: Do you have any favorite or simple recipes that create tasty food? PLEASE SHARE. I eat everything except seafood (which includes seaweed, because it came from the sea).