Day 1, Week 1: Cook for Good Summer Challenge
Jul 15, 2011
Have you already gone shopping to be ready to make the first week's menus? Don't worry if you haven't: you may already have the ingredients for day one on hand.
Let's start the Cook for Good Challenge with an immediate, delicious reward: warm Vanilla Pudding over a peaches or other fruit. Make enough pudding so everyone can have one serving today and one chilled tomorrow, with peaches on top. You're cooking once and enjoying twice!
While the milk warms up for the pudding, make Vinaigrette. Here's a new trick, too: dedicate a jar to your vinaigrette and mark the levels for vinegar and oil. You'll save a little extra time and clean up. Notice how adding the mustard and then shaking the jar creates a rich-looking salad dressing that separates more slowly than plain vinegar and oil.
How did your pudding turn out? Did you use peaches or other fruit? How are you feeling about starting the Cook for Good Challenge? Share your experience in the comments below.
Reader Comments (1)
Hello! I bought WAO as a personal treat a few days ago, read through it in 2 days, and then discovered that I'd missed this challenge by less than 2 weeks. And as I am too impatient to wait for the next go-round with the newsletter sometime this month, I am jumping in with just the blog posts.
My pudding was good, but too sweet. However, my peaches turned out to taste unripe, even though their texture is good, so some of the extra sweetness was welcome. I think I will be reducing the sugar next time. Linda, do I need to increase the amount of some other dry ingredient to make up for the reduced sugar?
I am excited about starting the Challenge, though I'm calling it my experiment to reduce the pressure I'd feel otherwise. Shopping today took longer than usual, due to actually weighing a bunch of vegetables, plus having to track down tahini (it was next to the peanut butter) and wheat germ (by the oatmeal).
I have one recommendation for future updates of the Challenge blog posts: please include the page numbers for the recipes. I'm doing fine referring to the Starter Plan guides in the book to find my page numbers, but that's not going to work next week.
Linda, thanks so much for pulling together such a great resource! I have wanted to plan meals ahead for years now, but never really managed to pull it off, and certainly not including provisions for leftovers. Hooray!