"Love people. Cook them tasty food."

I got this free bumper sticker from Penzeys Spices (http://www.penzeys.com/) which is an amazing spice store. If you haven't been there, go! I highly recommend their vanilla and taco spice. Anyway, I got this bumper sticker which is hanging on the fan above our stove:

On that note, Isaac and I decided to start cooking more dinners. We've been eating out quite a bit lately, which is expensive and not very healthy. So we each picked two nights a week to make dinner. Tonight is my first night. I cook on occasion, but I am not very adept. I hope to keep note of my cooking endeavors here. I will try to post helpful hints for those who, like me, know very little about cooking.

So I used this recipe tonight: Five Ingredient Pasta Toss. It calls for olive oil, bow-tie pasta (I bought the Barilla Plus brand because it is healthy and tasty), a couple of garlic cloves, fresh basil, white beans, and fire-roasted diced tomatoes. All of this was fine for me. Except the garlic. First, I mis-read and only needed two cloves when I bought two heads... So I need to find other things to do with the other one...

So I needed to crush the garlic cloves and combine them with the olive oil. I didn't really know how to work with garlic, so like the all-modern-woman, I googled it. This video was super awesome (and it worked!): How to Peel a Head of Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds. From there I could handle chopping and crushing, but here is a pretty good little video just in case: Garlic: Easy way to crush garlic.

Here is how my garlic turned out! So proud.

Just like the video!

And this is how the dish turned out. (Of course, I should probably invest in some serving bowls or something...)

And the verdict?

The garlic flavor didn't come through quite as well as I'd hoped and the whole could use a little salt and pepper. But otherwise, it was good. Isaac also approved. I call this fairly successful and I know how to change it for next time.