Cooking...A new segment

A new year is upon us, so resolutions abound. One of mine is to be more experimental with my cooking and to make time for it. I have always loved to cook but lately I have been sticking with the tried and true stuff that frankly has been getting kind of stale. So I blew the dust off my many cookbooks and restarted my search on foodtv.com. With all the changes in our lives, I really need to be more organized with our meals. In addition, with my impending full-time return-to-work, I have to plan meals ahead of time. This will have to include preparing easy-to-heat meals on the weekends and maybe a few new fast-prep dishes for the weeknights and lunches. This weekend was a bit of a success. We made Steamed mussels (reviewed below), rolled a massive amount of spring rolls and made a cauldron of chicken soup.

Steamed mussels - recipe found here -

It was a roaring success, if I don't say so myself.

F's Comments on the recipe:
1) A minor thing but pretty obvious to most cooks - please add salt and pepper to taste.
2) Rather than just serving a separate plate of pasta, I incorporated the pasta into the dish at the same time as the tomato was added to give the pasta time to absorb all the tasty sauce. Not enough time. Next time, I would probably remove the mussels and let the pasta just simmer in the sauce for a few minutes. Another thought is the use bean thread noodles (for the Filipinos, sotanghon). This kind of noodles absorb lots of water (sauce) and would be ideal here. YUM.

G's comments:
1) MORE WINE.
2) More crushed red pepper - of course, do this to taste.

CALLING ALL RECIPES - since I will be cooking a lot more, I would love to get recipes from anyone who is willing to share his/her favorites. I have a stack of cookbooks and a decent listing of online recipe sites, but nothing beats a good home recipe.