Anyone who knows me well enough knows I don’t cook. On a few spontaneous occasions, I’ve cooked simple dishes like eggs and bacon for breakfast or beef kabobs at a campsite. A couple of guys in my lifetime were even lucky enough to get a home-cooked dinner out of me. Usually, it’s the other way around. Since I’ve had a lot of free time on my hands, I’ve spent some of it reading up and watching shows on cooking. I’ve been trying to save money and unfortunately that entails eating cheap fast food several times a week. To break up the monotony and unhealthy food cycle, I decided to cook a real full course dinner for us last night. This was a lot of pressure I was putting on myself: there were 3 dishes I could potentially screw up. I decided to get all organic ingredients to get the most taste, just in case. For starters, I made tomato basil bruschetta with garlic oil and capra goat cheese with honey. This was the easiest recipe so I made it last.

For the side dish, I made a mango and avocado salad. This ended up being our favorite of the three. I’d never imagine black beans would taste so good with mango, lime juice, jalapenos and avocado! This took me about 20 minutes to make and it’s definitely an easy recipe to repeat again and again!

Jon chose the orange glazed salmon with mango relish recipe out of the six different ones I offered to cook. I have to say, preparing the mango relish took the longest: chopping up all those different ingredients and preparing the orange glaze took me about a hour. Maybe I’m slow because I’m new to cooking and I wanted to make sure I got it right, but all in all it took me about two and a half hours from start to finish for everything. The salmon came out soft and supple and I added jasmine rice to our plates to compliment the glaze. I think my first homemade three course dinner was a success and I had a lot of fun putting it together. I look forward to more cooking adventures!