I’m not used to cooking in foil packets, so this baked mixed vegetable foil packet I’m suggesting today is, indeed, the very first time I’m trying to cook it.

And I was quite daring, just so you know! 😄 I determined the recipe title days in advance of the actual day I baked it, something almost incredible around here, as deciding a recipe in advance for me is a chore, but a real task… It’s just me, my colleagues from the Team Light and Tasty sometimes experience, let’s say at their own expense. Oh yes, because I have this tendency to cook off the cuff, often without knowing what ingredients I will use.

I open the fridge and decide, cut, slice, light the fire, change my mind, change pots, put water on for a first course, change my mind again, turn it off, transform the sauce into a second course, or the second into a sauce (the cod one shows it), after rummaging in the fridge again and checking the clock again, but with the certainty that the last decision is the right one since oh my gosh how late it is!!! And the result of all this is that the recipes, when I cook them this way, even turn out better (incredible but true)!

But I (fortunately) have the family jury to confirm it, otherwise who would believe me! 😁

I said “experience at their own expense,” because: when in the past I had the audacity to tell my colleagues from the Team the title of my Monday recipe before cooking it, every time I had to ask all of them to change it. Because in the meantime, the recipe had undergone some inevitable, ineluctable transformation. 😅

Parenthesis. I recently participated in a training course for bloggers (trying to do serious things here!) and one of the fundamental things they tried to teach us (teach me, the other bloggers surely learned everything!) is that it would be better to plan recipes in advance. Ehm, that is… and what could I ever plan if even while I’m cooking I don’t know what I’m actually cooking?? 😄

And so it happened that the Monday column extended a hand trying to help me in this endeavor of preventive mental programming, urging me to decide on a recipe (topic: long cooking) by a certain precise unchangeable day, at least once in a lifetime.

I took a deep breath and forced myself to decide on a recipe, committing not to modify it. And I was pretty good I think. I chose a very generic title, a nice ‘mixed vegetables’ that allowed me plenty of leeway! 🤪

The ample leeway then had its inevitable setbacks (karma is karma, some hitch had to happen, did you have doubts?) when I discovered that the only vegetable I didn’t want to compromise on, that I decided I would never change during the process (celeriac), was removed from the supermarket supplies. I mean. You understand, right? There’s a supermarket where for years and years, always, I buy celeriac, where even when I wasn’t interested in buying it I saw it there nicely displayed in boxes full of beautiful celeriac, and now that I’ve decided a recipe in advance and that I decided not to change it… they remove it from sale! (I was told due to poor sales, hard to believe, apparently, I was the only one buying it!!).

Luckily, I was foresighted and opted for ‘baked mixed vegetable foil packet’ and not ‘celeriac foil packet’. Phew! The change to the planned recipe that should have taught me the intransigence of ingredients was inevitable, however, the recipe title communicated to my colleagues remained intact, unaware of the turmoil of changes happening behind its back. 😅

Epilogue: while cooking I said to myself: Ah! If I had two Jerusalem artichokes in the fridge I’d add them. Oh gosh, but then I could have bought Jerusalem artichokes! I would have saved myself from searching high and low for the celeriac that wasn’t there! 😅 Basically… 🎶 how nice it is to cook by feeling from Trieste downward! 🎶

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Do you need some more ideas-with-mixed-vegetables (with or without foil packet)? 👇😉