Mediocre recipes need improvements

It's true - you can try a new recipe and spend all day working on it, and in the end - it's just okay. This is sort of what today felt like. Both my mother and I both spent what seemed like the whole day in the kitchen. My task at hand was finding something to do with the leftover chicken roaster from last night's dinner so I decided the best thing would be a soup of some sort. I also bought a bag of lentils over the weekend at the grocery store that I wanted to try out - so I paired the two and made a sort of Indian Lentil Soup. After a whole lot of chopping, stirring, simmering - the lentil soup was just okay. I definitely didn't season it enough and I'm going to be on the lookout for a better lentil soup recipe (so stay posted!).

My mother put so much work into a homemade Cinnamon Raisin Bread and for some reason, the yeast just didn't do it's job - the bread didn't rise very much and so the bread, after cooking, was very dense. I thoroughly enjoyed the slice I tried, but I think we can do better! It's the worst when you spend so long making homemade bread - kneading, rising, mixing in the flour, shaping - and it just doesn't rise like it's supposed to.

For a while now my mom has been talking about making "mincemeat pie." It's this pre-made filling with lots of raisins, apples and spices - as beautiful as this pie came out, I wanted nothing to do with it! Raisin pie, no thank you. She insisted and made it today. Final result - everything is better homemade, but we already knew this. This filling was too sweet and tasted a little fake. We all agreed that if we made a homemade filling it would be better - but I'm still not sold on this type of pie.

So, no recipes to share tonight but hopefully I can share a few improved recipes soon!