I cooked yesterday. I spent about three hours. The food cooked longer.

Because I wanted to make a good batch of spaghetti sauce, I hunted down tomato puree. What is it about Salem that no one carries more than a very few cans of puree?! There were two cans and no marked place for them where I finally found them. I guess there are too few Italian cooks here. I finally snagged two large cans and three tiny ones. It was enough to make thick sauce. For the first time in a while, it tastes the way I want, too, so obviously (to me) puree is important. I guess I’ll need to check different stores every time I plan to make spaghetti sauce, if I want it to taste right.

I also made pot roast, which we were going to eat yesterday, but apparently I was cooking it too slowly. It’s perfect today, however.

Later this week I hope to make large batches of jambalaya and chicken saag. I’m trying to select foods that taste good as leftovers. For me, that generally means saucy or soupy foods. Iqbal made Aloo gobi and samosas. I’m not sure if his aloo gobi was saucy enough. We’ll see. The samosas are an experiment. He fried them as usual, but they will be baked. If we don’t finish the pot roast this week, it will be made into soup. At some point I’m also going to try mac ‘n’ cheese. Not a large batch to begin with. I’m not really sure how well it will hold up in the freezer.

I just spent an hour looking at various glass freezer-to-oven containers. Gosh! Large enough small containers are difficult to figure out. Most containers seem to be under 16 oz. (often under 8 oz.), or family sized, or in a set with other sizes. The ones that look about right have mixed reviews (measurement to the brim, so actually less for freezing, and poor lids were the main complaints), but over all were good. However, before I buy 6, 8, or 10 container packs I need to do my own measuring. Glass containers are not cheap!

And I need to go through my kitchen cupboards and get rid of stuff. I really don’t need three slow cookers. I don’t even know how I got three of them (and don’t seem to have the one I remember). And cups and mugs! I think we use one of four shelves in the cups and glasses cupboard. I probably have two of every bowl we need. Some of the serving bowls I really do use, but the larger ones are mostly used only at holidays. In everyday cooking, I tend to go from pot to plate. It’s just two of us. And Iqbal is almost as bad as my mom was about buying spices we already have. And he’s worse about not tightening the spice lids (well, any lids really). I am so not good at thinning stuff. I can generally not add stuff pretty well, but once it’s in it’s a different matter. But I’m getting up to my eyeballs.

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