How To Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food (Original 1998 edition) proved to be as good as I thought it would be. In the past, I have often used it as a starting point for recipes, and this week was no change to that...though with half of the recipes from the book that I used with this week just modified them flat out.
Black Beans with Niman Ranch Chorizo & Rice (card)
This card turned out to be very good. It was a nice combination of meat rice, and vegtable matter. Maybe it could have been a bit spicier...if that's what you are looking for I suppose
Chicken Soup with Rice (p. 73)
This one wasn't really meant to be a main course. So I added peas, corn, carrots and more chicken to make it more of a stew, then a soup. I suppose the soup would turn out to be pretty good, though, if you were sickly and just wanted something nice, simple and warming.
Spaghetti alla Carbonara (p. 141)
Anything that uses bacon fat in the recipe can't be that bad. I really enjoyed how simple this was to make and how good it tasted. though I doubt very much I'd ever order this in a restaurant again...cause it was seriously super easy.
Bean and Tomato Casserole (p 512)
I started out with the idea to remain true to this recipe, but when I was in the store, I thought more about making into a sort of Mexican type lasagna. So I layered it not only with the tomatoes, but also with tortillas. I added diced tomatoes and left over turkey that I cooked up to the beans, and lessened the amount of beans that I used to get around the total of 6 cups of filling that it called for. I also added two jalapeno peppers.
Spicy Tofu with Ground Pork (p 526)
I've used tofu before, but not very often...so something with so much tofu was a bit daunting at first. But it turned out OK. I think that if I was able to flavor the tofu before hand, it might have been better. Also, I was a bit surprised by what it called for right of the bat. The recipe said that it'd take about half an hour, but the first instruction was to firm up the firm tofu by letting it get dryer for about an hour. I think an hour is a bit hard to fit into 30 minutes, though this is not the first recipe to do this...and I guess that's what I get for not reading the whole thing before making it.