Cooking With Gojee

I cooked this weekend. I was originally going to write up about these awesome pillow cookies I made, or this great chicken thing I made (pictures and links down below) but really, who wants to read about that. Especially since I'm not a cook and don't particularly enjoy cooking. But this weekend I enjoyed it, and it got me wondering why.

The first thing that helped me enjoy cooking is probably the biggest hurdle I hate, finding something to make. Yes, there are many recipe sites out there, but they don't work for me. In most things I enjoy reading up on how to do things, but not with food. I want a big picture showing the final product. Not what most recipe sites that I know have, which are little thumbnails surrounded by a column of navigational text, a center column of recipe text, and sometimes a third column suggesting other recipes if I like this recipe. If you want to get me hooked show me big well done pictures of your stuff and make the recipe part secondary. If I like what I see I'll go the extra click or 2 to get to the recipe. And that's exactly what Gojee does.

Gojee doesn't host the recipes. It's not like some other websites. Gojee, as I understand it, has editors that do the dirty work of curating recipes from great food bloggers and writers and showing them to you. You can spend all day just flipping through pictures or you can tell Gojee what you have and what you're wanting and it will spit back some great things. One thing to keep in mind is that the actual full recipe are usually housed on the individual writer's website or blog, but Gojee will tell you the basics of it before you go clicking for more so you can decide if you want to more info. My favorite feature though has been their weekly email that highlights the 3 most popular dishes viewed on the site in the Vegetarian, Meat, and Dessert categories. And, again unlike other sites, the email features pictures. It's from those emails that I got interested in cooking up a couple things this weekend.

First up, Pillow Cookies. Only in my childhood dreams had I imagined the joining together of cookies and brownies. It seemed like dessert nirvana to me. So I was surprised to find that someone had actually done it. A chocolate chip cookie with a brownie in the middle. Having not made homemade chocolate chip cookies since I was very young this was a good learning experience and fun to make. My first bite of a still warm cookie was not favorable though as the melted chocolate chips overpowered the brownie. Having 1 later in the evening improved the taste much more as you could both taste and feel the brownie. I'd make this again, but with pre-made dough.




Then Sunday for dinner I made a simple to make (far simpler than these cookies) rosemary chicken dish. It was very tasty and will probably make it's way into my dinner routine.