Archive for Cooking

Cooking is fun!

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Reuven loves cooking

He still needs a lot of help with sharp or hot things, but he loves helping in the kitchen!

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Happy Birthday Reuven!

Reuven decorated his own cake!

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Cooking in Corning

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Random Recipe Attempts

We tried to make Toad in the Hole today. It’s one of those things that, not being even vaguely British, I’ve never had. However, generous doses of Britcoms on PBS have exposed me to the idea of the dish. (Nothing much beyond the idea; I didn’t really know what was in it.)

So, when I found a very simple recipe for it, I had to try.

Taste-wise it was ok. It’s rather hard to make sausages taste bad, after all! The most fun was cooking: parts of the batter poofed up like crazy, possibly because of spots of too much oil underneath (or possibly that’s what it’s supposed to do, I don’t know for sure). It is very easy, fun for the kids (Lillian loved laying the sausages toads in neat rows, and chided me when they rolled out of position), and… well, not all that healthy, I guess

🙂

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Delicious challah…

Lillian helped bake the challah for tonight. Due to the wonderous thing of beauty that is a bread machine, this is really just a process of (1) measuring ingredients (2) dumping them in and (3) braiding the dough after it is mixed, kneaded, and risen.

We still need to work on egg breaking. In addition to a few shell shards that needed to be fished out, there was this:

Bad aim!

Oh well, to make bread you need to break some eggs. If it’s an egg bread, that is.

I’ve been salting the tops of some of my loaves recently, instead of using poppy or sesame seeds; it tastes like a big fat eggy pretzel. Mmmmm..

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Let them look at cake

Walking to a connection in the Philadelphia airport, I saw a display of photographs on the wall. Basically, it was pictures she had taken of her sculptures.

The unusual part: the sculpture material was cake and icing.

Typically, a thought of cake decorating brings to mind elegant swirls and flowers and precision placement of patterns and decoration. Think of wedding cakes (ours would not be a good example, Daleks are definitely unusual). But her cakes — these were birthday cakes like your kids would make, tons of color, tons of icing, and clearly valuing enthusiasm and joy over precision and elegance. I imagined giving Lillian access to unlimited icing color choices and setting her loose… these would be the cakes she produced.

I’ve never been a huge art fan, because I don’t tend to “get it.” This, though, is my taste.

I also like some of the discussion of her motivations found on her web site:

… the industry of do- it- yourself divas is still going strong in television, magazines and books. It’s a fantasy world where entertaining, cooking and decorating unite…. one needs to have a beautiful home, decorated seasonally, in order to entertain friends with gourmet meals and elaborately concocted desserts.

I totally get this!!! I just want a house that is mostly clean, because that’s all guests really need to be concerned with; the decorating should be what we feel comfortable sitting on and looking at. We are stuck living here year-round, guests are here for a meal or a few days. If they are interested in where I live more than in who I am, then I doubt they are the sort of people I really want coming over to my house. The house will reflect my identity, not the other way around.

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