Martha Stewart better watch her back

I would like to start cooking proper meals from recipes. What I have been doing since college is just sort of cobbling together dinners from really random, disparate types of food. It's always worked fine for me; I don't have a very gourmet palate and I'll eat most anything (I'm like a goat).

Most nights, dinner is some combination of the following: veggies with dip, cereal, yogurt, apples with peanut butter, sandwich, soup, pasta with marinara sauce, applesauce, dried fruit, frozen waffles. But gawd, when I type it all out like that, I am forced to admit that I live mainly on finger foods, and that I am sort of behind, in a human-development, growing-up way. So I have decided that I want to try and rectify the situation.

In my defense. In my house growing up, my stepfather got home from work much earlier than my mom did, so he would start dinner and she would sort of finish it up as soon as she walked in the door. (I wasn't, like, waited on hand and foot or anything; I did the dishes.) So we mainly ate random things thrown together too, and while our typical random things was not quite as basic as mine, they were items such as Shake and Bake chicken, frozen turkey burgers, canned vegetables, and salads made from iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, and dressing. (On a side note, this is why I despised salad until about a year ago, when I discovered the Signature Salad at Cosi, and realized that the phrase tasty salad was not an oxymoron coined by anorexics.) Not exactly the best example of "home cookin'," right?

Now, the few times that I've thrown "dinner parties," if you can still call them that when you and all your friends are sitting on the floor eating off of an Ikea coffee table, I have really enjoyed doing all the chopping and cooking necessary to end up with an actual prepared meal. The problem, I think, is that I live alone, and it seems a waste of time and energy to do all this work just for myself, when I'm not even all that bothered about what I eat. Also, when I walk in the door I'm pretty much hungry enough to gnaw on my bedspread, so spending hours filleting things is probably out. But I do think I would like to try that trick where you cook a lot on Sundays and then freeze things in small containers to eat periodically. I can definitely handle that.

So. I am going to start doing something totally foreign to me: I am going to collect recipes. And then I will copy them onto index cards and put them in a little box. Oh, the humanity! The homemaker-osity! What next? Will I start darning socks and crocheting lampshades? Building barns with the help of a few dozen Amish neighbors (tm Witness)? Only time will tell. Baby steps!

Anyway, I am open to recipe suggestions, and will eat anything except broccoli. I promise to try anything suggested to me and I'll let you know how it goes. Bonus points if it can be made with the ingredients I currently have at home. Just kidding! Ha ha. (I think.)