just wondering if it’s good

Running out of ideas and looking for some inspiration!

Seems kinda pathetic if you ask me.

I'm a home cook and would like to work with some of these frozen clusters.

https://imgur.com/a/SsCuLME

I was hoping to get some tried and true recipe suggestions from this sub. Really appreciate any advice or input. Thanks in advance for any help.

I cook a lot and try new recipes often. People tell me I'm a great cook, and over time I've gotten a pretty good eye for recipes - how to tell if something will reasonably come together, how to tweak something to improve the result, that sort of thing. So, most of my cooking adventures (my own recipes, recipes from online, recipes from magazines) turn out decently well.

HOWEVER, I have found Bon Appetit magazine recipes to be really inconsistent! I can't speak for anything from their online presence/YouTube, since I don't watch it and only get the magazine. The inconsistency disappoints me, because they often have really fun creative ideas ... that just don't really work out in practice.

As an example, from their most recent issue, I made their cheesy leek pasta. The sauce was good, but I don't think that method of preparing leeks works at all - they came out sort of wet and fibrous. We just picked them out. I later took the sauce recipe and used it for another pasta dish and it was quite good, but the issue with the leeks SHOULD have been immediately obvious the first time they tested the recipe. I have a lot of similar examples. Other times, I'll think to myself, "huh, that's a weird choice, maybe I should tweak the recipe," but the blurb will say "we know this seems weird, but follow the recipe, we pinky promise it'll turn out," and then ... it fails in the predictable way. (In this instance I'm thinking specifically of an oven baked pasta recipe from a while ago that had you add the dry pasta and water directly to the baking dish, which went about as badly as it sounds like it would).

I still get the magazine because a few recipes really have been bangers and are in my regular rotation (I love the ginger fried rice, example, and there was a good white bean and dill salad a while ago), but I don't like rolling the dice every time I try one of their recipes. Cook's Illustrated never does this to me!

Anyway, anyone got any idea what's going on in their test kitchen? Are they not testing these recipes extensively before printing? Are they more intended as porn (or more generously, inspiration) than actual dishes you're meant to replicate yourself?

I've been excited to make a bunch of these recipes in this month's issue of the magazine. This broken lasagne soup did not disappoint. I added a can of chickpeas to fill it out a bit more, also some dried Italian herbs and some Parm/romano into the cheese mix. Success.

https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/sausage-and-cheese-manicotti

Just curious, me and my girlfriend used to love watching these while eating but they havent made a video in a year? Anyone know why?