Cooking just got a whole lot more creative

I love to cook, and Brent loves that I love to cook.

Every Sunday afternoon, I pull down one of my MANY cookbooks and start flipping through the recipes looking for something new to try. I'm totally not a fish person, so I generally start with the meat or chicken sections and narrow it down by what both Brent and I will like.

For the record, Brent loves onions, which are found in many recipes. This is unfortunate because I HATE having to eat them. But I do eat them - the small ones that I can't pick out of my food, because I am a great wife and I make the dishes that call for onions with them instead of leaving them out like I'd prefer.

Throwing another wrench into the mix is that I am willing to try new foods, I generally DO NOT like anything that swims in the sea. (Exception: tuna fish. In a can, not looking at me from a plate.)

Both of these statements were never more proven then on the day a few months ago that I was invited to a friend's parents' home in Queens for lunch. Ignazio and his family are hard-core Italians, so I was expecting something along the lines of an amazing spaghetti dish with homemade sauce. Instead, I sat down to an eight-course (that's right: EIGHT) seafood meal. Though his brother had slaved over the soup he made from scratch, I will admit it wasn't as bad as I thought. The octopus salad was more of a challenge. The company was good, though!

My seafood aversion is important, however, because Brent eats salmon at least once a week. And I'd say he orders it at restaurants when we go out more than half the time. Though I will still not join him in eating the fish that stinks up our entire house for hours after its cooked, I have learned to make it for him. (And the award for wife of the year goes to... ME!)

Another thing I must note is that when Brent finds a dish that he likes, he'll want to eat it all the time for months until he gets so sick of it that he doesn't touch it for months. Lately, he's on a salmon, wheat rice, peppers, and olive oil kick, and wants me to make it for him EVERY WEEK. Don't get me wrong, I love to cook for him, but cooking the same thing over and over and over is just plain booooooooring! Plus, since I don't get to eat it, what's in it for me? So lately, I've been using my cooking as an outlet for my creativity - which is promptly destroyed once Brent starts eating, so I've started to take some photos of my creations.

The first photo is a dish I call "Butterfly Fishes" (And yes, I do know that the plural of "fish" is "fish," but the title is a play on the popular wedding song "Butterfly kisses." For those of you who don't know, I just got married so tons of wedding-related paraphernalia is still locked inside my head.

The second dish is one I call "Fishy Flowers" because that's just what it looks like to me.

Though I'm definitely not this creative when trying out a new dish, it's fun to experiment with something I know I can cook! Though with such simple ingredients, I may soon run out of ideas. That's when I improvise. Stay tuned.