Cooking

I really don't like cooking.

Really? You'll say!

I'm astonished! I thought all you ovary bearing female types were somehow bio engineered to enjoy cooking! Slaving away over a hot stove for hours on end, fussing with presentation and plates and glasses and napkins and the like, and then spending hours cleaning up the dishes. I thought you enjoyed serving and hovering like a mother hen; isn't it programmed into your genes?

You mean that scream wasn't a scream of joy?

Hah.

I have, however, come to enjoy cooking. Specifically, I have come to enjoy taking what is probably a perfectly good recipe and ruining it. I have discovered that I am, much to my surprise, a precise person. I want a recipe to be as detailed as instructions for....measuring a piece of wood.

Recipes are vague. Recently tried to make an Angel Food Cake, and the instructions said "whip egg whites until peaks form".

Unless you bake regularly (which I confess, I do not) this means nothing. Less than nothing. So like any good user of the internet, I Googled. I found pictures galore, yes, of peaked egg whites. This was not what I had in mind.

I was looking for a simple correlation between the amount of time one must spend holding the blender in the egg whites and the blender speed. Yes, to me, that seems logical. Ten minutes on high, that sort of thing, like you see with the oven, or with grilling. Not something as vague as "whip egg whites until peaks form".

The cake was edible, but did not resemble in terms of consistentcy an "angel food cake".

One thing I've finally realized, indeed, shamelessly stolen from all the cooking shows I've never watched is that it pays to prep. For years, I've prepped as I've gone. You know, started cooking and kept chopping. That really sucks, and inevitably something is burnt, etc. The one advantage to this is that you economize on pot and utensil useage.

However, if you unload the dishwasher and wipe off the counters first, and then start chopping up everything you need, and then start cooking, you can actually focus on what you are making...and enjoy actually cooking. And have time to load the dishwasher with all the extra crap you used to chop and mince and flambe (or whatever).

So I made a different potato soup last night. My potato soup is normally just stock and potatoes and cheese. Last nights contained leeks, onions, milk, flour, salt, pepper, rosemary, paprika, bacon, bacon fat (gasp) and whatever else I could throw into the bloody pot. At some point, I looked at the recipe and said "no farking way am I putting that into a perfectly good pot of soup" and went in search of something else. And I found the potato to broth ratio waaaayyyyy too skimpy, and so doubled the potatoes for a nice hearty soup. Yum. Oh, and bread. With Butter. Yeah! In a bowl shaped like a fish.

I left every single dish in the sink.

They are still there even as we speak.

Giada I am not.