Summer is now almost surely over. It has been getting cooler almost daily since the first weekend of September. And yesterday was a rain fest.

Today is gloomy, foggy, with drizzles in the air. The playgrounds still damp. Looking at the upcoming fall and winter months and the fact that my son, now 16 months old, sleeps sparingly during the day allowing incredibly little work time, I thought it may be a good idea to treat my wife and try out some new recipes.

While my wife loves to cook and does most of our cooking, I prep/cook a couple dinners a week. But I always stick to my comfort base. Salads (but beautiful ones, if I may humbly say), simple chicken dishes (these are truly simple and I think are tasty, maybe), simple pastas (simple in the number of ingredients also).

So today I decided that my son and I would venture a bit into the world of cooking.

For tonight’s dinner we are prepping Butternut Squash Soup and Seared Chicken Breast with Red Onion Vinaigrette.

We were missing a few ingredients, so the morning activity was to visit the market. And now while my son is taking a bit of a nap, I need to marinate the chicken breasts and figure out which parts of the recipes I’ll likely have to skip because of complexity.

The idea is to treat my wife and enjoy explaining all the steps to my son.

Watch him play with bowls and spoons or such. Stack the bowls, put the spoons into the bowls. Put the bowls on shelves. Remove the bowls from the shelves. Put the spoons on the shelves. And repeat.

And hopefully we both learn something. Being too ambitious and having a 4 hour ordeal that frustrates everyone is not the goal.

We’ll see how it goes.