The other day I was talking about leftover food with a group of people, and one of them said something that piqued my interest.

“I don't worry about leftovers, because I've been eating the same thing for lunch for the last 3 years.”

The only time I've ever heard of someone eating something that consistently, was when Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox worked together on Friends. Apparently they ate a Cobb Salad everyday for 10 years. In the small scheme of things I find that kind of consistency remarkable.

So, I asked my friendly acquaintance which lunch recipe kept him coming back for more. And he said it was Mujadara, a brown rice and lentil dish with fruit, nuts, cardamom, cinnamon, cumin. He said he uses pork or chicken in the dish as well. He said it's great either warm or at room temperature.

Well, well, well. Who wouldn't want to eat that consistently? This dish has the double benefit of being very budget conscious as well as incredibly delicious. And just saying: “I'm having Mujadara for lunch” makes a mid-day meal feel a little elegant.

The other night I was making fried chicken, and when I was about the pull the chicken out of the marinade I realized that we were out of a crucial ingredient – seasoned salt. We were hungry and it was about 7 p.m., so I didn't feel like running to the grocery store. I racked my brain and thought of what was in “seasoned salt,” and I realized we had everything in the kitchen to make my own. The only thing we didn't have was dried parsley. But, I had a bunch of flat-leaf parsley in the freezer. I turned the oven on it's lowest setting, cut off some parsley, dried it on paper towels, baked it for ½ an hour and Voilà! We had dried parsley for homemade seasoned salt.

Last week for our anniversary we had tacos – and since we are no longer strictly adhering to our “unprocessed foods only” pledge that we took in 2011, I bought us some traditional bottled taco sauce. And I didn't mind it, I even enjoyed it. But it did make me curious to try to make some myself. I took ingredients from around the kitchen and blended them into a perfectly spicy mixture that will be great as a finishing sauce for tacos, chicken, beef, pork or even just a cheese quesadilla.

As I've mentioned before, we're lucky enough to live down the street from Rail City Market, which is a health food store here in town that sells spices in bulk. So, when it comes to cooking we are two lucky, lucky people. We can go and buy small amounts of a lot of different spices and get out of there without spending more than 5 dollars. That allows us a lot of freedom to play with different spices and to create our own spice blends. For gifts this year, we made our own curry, Chinese five spice and Moorish blends for gifts and holiday cooking.

We gave all of the curry away without getting a photo of it. Which is too bad, because that was pretty epic to make. We didn't have an electric spice grinder at the time, so I toasted the spices and Jedd ground them through an old pepper mill. It took him an hour and a half, and by the end of the process he had band aids on all of his fingers for protection from blisters – and to protect the blisters that had already formed. Ouch. It was delicious, though. Then the birthday fairy miraculously brought me an electric grinder for an early birthday present and we delved into our next round of spice making, blister free.