Learning to Cook

Day 5.  34.8 pounds to go (5 lbs down)

Breakfast: V8, grapes & an apple with peanut butter.
Lunch:  spinach salad with mandarin oranges, walnuts & dried cherries
Dinner:  Brown rice, hummus and 1/2 of a baked sweet potato

I'm full.  Very, very, very full -- and ironically I'm eating MUCH less food than I was consuming before embarking on this experiment.  Must be all that fiber. 

I hate that I don't know how to cook, and yet I really don't see the point in learning how to cook elaborate dishes when the only one I'm feeding is me.  I could probably get away with some form of pre-prepared food at Whole Paycheck or PCC, but the idea of it is just so unappealing.  So tonight, I cooked.  To be fair, I'm not sure you could call it cooking, but at one point it actually did entail gettng out the Betty Crocker volume. 

Brown rice took 55 minutes total... literally just rice, water and some sea salt... and it took 55 minutes.  I will say this, though.  Brown rice is delicious.  I'm not sure why I ever ate the white stuff to begin with.  The cookbook came out to figure out how to bake the sweet potatoes.  It's actually kind of sad that I needed a cookbook to tell me that I should puncture them with a fork, wrap them in aluminium foil, and throw them in a 425 degree oven for 40 - 50 minutes... but whatever.  Had I not read it, I would have left out the puncturing with fork part and perhaps had exploded sweet potatoes.

I did the potatoes on my grill outside, which is is hooked up to the gas line for the house.  It's such an efficient way to cook, and it also ensures that my un-air-conditioned house does not heat up.  The sweet potato (with literally nothing on it) was delicious right off the grill -- can't imagine why I'm just learning about this at 42.