Hello!
Our Dad is usually the cook in our house.
However he’s currently on a retreat for four nights and our mom had the idea of each of us three kids plus herself taking charge of a dinner each night.
My brother and I for sure wanted to do it on our own.
When we do kids cook nights it’s usually the three of us but I’ve been wanting to do one on my own.
I decided on this crock pot Pasta e Fagioli, a soup that I’ve gotten several times at Olive Garden! I thought it would be fun making myself!
I did the prep work in the morning and it cooked in the crock pot all day. I enjoyed prepping it, although it took a lot longer than I expected and probably longer than it should have! That’s okay though.
Looking back on it overall I enjoyed it but maybe not in every moment I was enjoying it. I don’t know.
I loved smelling it and checking in on it throughout the day! It turned out yummy! We also bought some Italian bread to go along with it. It was delicious but the main problem was that I decided to ignore the 1 cup of pasta on the recipe and added a lot more! That sucked out a lot of the liquid unfortunately. It was still good though!
Overall I had fun and I’m excited to do another meal like this!
What’s something you liked about it (and why)? I loved the flavor! It had a really nice tomato base, and that beef in there was really nice.
I also loved all the vegetables! They were very yummy and being cooked down for so long made them very soft and easy to eat. I wasn’t sure about the cabbage or if I had cut it small enough but it was so soft you could barely even tell it was there. It felt like a pretty healthy soup with all those vegetables too!
What’s something you disliked about it (and why)? I wish it wouldn’t have been so casserole-y. I regret putting so many noodles in! It was okay, but it was meant to be a soup- it still had that at first but after a while it got worse.
I also wish I would have been more open to other people helping and stuff. I wanted it to be mine and my thing. At times I may not have been very open to people helping, looking at it or the suggestions they gave.
What was your biggest takeaway or lesson? Probably the reminder that putting in way more noodles than the recipe calls for affects the liquid a lot. I knew that as I was putting them in, but they were also small which was another reminder- that small noodles get bigger! Again I knew these things- but they were good reminders seeing how they played out.
What is something you’re curious to learn more about as a result of this experience? I’d like to not only cook more but learn more about cooking and how to cook certain things, get techniques, get better at it, etc. To develop more of the skill of cooking.
Thank you for reading!
Lucy
