Weekly Recipe Challenge

So recent;y I've taken a leap out of advertising to try my hand at cooking. I've an avid home cook and try make all sorts of things as often as possible.
As of last week my girlfriend started a new Sunday thing to help broaden my repertoire of culinary skills.. She'll go buy ingredients to a recipe she's keen on, present them tome without a recipe and leave me to make something out of what she got. This week's main ingredient was phyllo pastry. Along with it came mushrooms, cottage cheese, eggs, spring onion, garlic, butter, cinnamon, honey, walnuts , sugar and vanilla essence. I think that was it... I am allowed to use a bunch of kitchen staples like salt and pepper, stock, oils etc...

Long story short, I made two dishes. One, the dessert, was an obvious one based on the ingredients. I suppose there were a few things I could have done with the main, but I went with a mushroom tart, that upon drawing out of the oven looked a bit messy, but once plates I saved it a little... it tasted a whole lot better than it looked.

The obvious dessert was baklava. It was my first time making it. I have seen it being made before and it seemed simple enough, and it really is. Layers of buttered phyllo and walnuts until you're happy with the amount of layers. To be honest, the syrup was a little too sweet, but just under the "too sweet" mark, so it was good enough. There will be tweaks for the next one and it'll be amazing!

A lot of people I know despise cooking or just can't bring themselves past frying an egg because they just "burn everything". I have to say that cooking is the most rewarding thing next to writing music. The amount of love and combinations that you can put in to create a symphony of tastes, textures and pure happiness.
It is my goal to share with the world how easy and rewarding cooking can be. Even if you do it once a week, not only will it make you happy it will definitely brighten up someone else's day.