I don’t know if this is something common to compulsive overeaters and/or the morbidly obese, but I have a fantasy of getting to the place where I have a gourmet kitchen where I cook fabulous meals with my SO while sipping Chardonnay and looking at the sunset in the distance out the picture window. This fantasy is very much reinforced every week when I see the kitchens on Extreme Makeover !

Instead, for the last ten years, I’ve lived in a cramped little apartment and inhaled really bad for you takeout food while watching TV with my cats.

It’s not like I cannot cook or bake. I’m actually pretty proficient, and in fact, I worked several years for a gourmet, high-end caterer in the Boston area. I’ve also had some fairly nice parties (including a fab wine tasting for a friend’s 30th). And one year, as a gift to my mother, I cooked Christmas dinner, and grilled a butterflied leg of lamb in the snow (well, actually, my brother did most of that!).

But in the ten years since my mother died, I’ve really regressed. The closest I usually come to cooking is boiling water to cook pasta and/or nuking something. The whole idea of cooking for myself just seemed to require more energy than I could muster.

And even in the last several months as I’ve been eating healthy, I’ve managed to do it with very minimal food prep myself.

Yet all that time, my collection of cookbooks (like this one) has accrued, and I’ve been religiously watching shows like 30 Minute Meals, Good Eats, and America’s Test Kitchen.

Thus it is with some pleasure that I report that I actually cooked something for myself last night: I made my variant of stoup (which is “thicker than soup and thinner than stew”). It’s something that fits in with my Abe Lincoln “when I do good, I feel good” plan; and one meal is a start!

I did figure out that making stoup in a stainless steel stock pot doesn’t make a lot of sense (too easy to burn stuff on a gas stove). But my stoup still came out great. I sautéed onions, garlic, and chopped up portabellos, then added some veggie stock, fire-roasted tomatoes (Rachel Ray loves those!), brown rice, a can of soup beans, and fresh spinach. I put this over top some chopped up steak (still trying to beat the anemia). Very yummy, and as Rachel Ray says, you can’t beat the one pot cleanup!