Food and Running and Books About Food and Running

I have a couple random comments today.  The first one is for everyone who always says they can't cook or that the food they make doesn't turn out or that they don't like the taste of whole foods.  We all have our bad days and today was mine. 

First of all, back when we were writing Besides Pizza, Kayleigh and I would often try new foods and then post our opinion.  Our biggest failure was papaya.  We hated it.  We didn't like the taste or the texture.  So that was a food I complete wrote off.  A couple weeks ago, we got together with friends and two of them were telling me how they love papaya.  When I said we didn't like it, they gave me a few pointers.  First they said to make sure you let it get very ripe.  Also, the peel has a very bad flavor so they said to make sure you get it all cut off.  Being the good sports that we are, we bought another papaya.  I left it sitting around until it looked nice and ripe.  Then I cut away everything except the very center part of the flesh.  It looked beautiful but then we tasted it.  Nope - still don't like it!

Then I made sweet muffins.  This is a recipe I learned in junior high cooking class.  I've made it thousands of times.  Today the muffins would not come out of the liners and they tasted all wrong.  I have no idea what happened.

So when you get frustrated with cooking just remember - everyone has things they don't like and everyone messes up recipes from time to time.  Forget about those things and move on.

Before Kayleigh went to work today (because she does that now!) we went to the library.  I've been taking her to the library on a regular basis since she was 3 years old.  A couple years ago they started remodeling our library and it is finally done.  We walked all over checking out where everything is now.  It is really nice and the layout makes more sense.  Kayleigh was a little disappointed that they removed the stuffed animals from the kid's section.  She used to line them all up and read to them.

As we wandered, we found tons of books to check out.  I ended up with one running book and several cookbook/nutrition books.  If I like them, I'll be sure to do a book review for everyone. 

We are about to head out the door to run.  Will it be a good run like our visit to the library or a bad run like the papaya and muffins?  We'll see!