I have about 5 cookbooks on my shelf. A Better Homes and Gardens red and white checked one, a Weight Watchers Simply the Best, a couple of Cooking Light cookbooks I found at a yard sale for almost nothing, one about food from Italy, one for cooking with kids … you get the picture. So, there’s probably at least 2 years worth of meals in there. (I have to assume there are fish recipes and I don’t like fish. Plus I hate the way it smells up the house. Bleah.)

So why am I still making the same 5-6 meals all the time? It’s spaghetti, meatloaf, homemade little pizzas, chili, chicken stir fry and cheese enchiladas with an occasional marinara sauce and augmented with Costco’s amazing chicken pot pie.

Okay, now I have to digress a moment. Have you tried the chicken pot pie from Costco? I am not generally a chicken pot pie fan. My daughter tried some one day when we were picking up a big box of diapers for her sister and really liked it. Since she’s not really a chicken fan, I bought one since she loved it so much. I thank her for that every time I cook one for dinner. This pot pie is huge — about the size of a medium/large pizza and competely delish. We could eat it for days. In fact we do, because there’s no way we can finish one at one sitting.

I have read these cookbooks many times. I have marked recipes, but just never seem to try a new one. Maybe it’s because my time is so limited that I tend to cook stuff I can do almost on autopilot. If this were the kind of blog with lots of readers, I’d say hey everyone … give me your recipe recommendations. So if anyone out there stumbles on this blog, send your recipes my way.

Just remember that while I follow directions exceptionally well, I’m not into cooking things that take all day or a tremendous (more than 30-40 minutes) amount of preparation. In fact, cooking that chicken pot pie stretches my attention span to the breaking point. I have to cook it for 90 minutes. That means planning way ahead for dinner in my book!