This week I began working on goals for the coming months and next year. More on how I'm doing that in a future post. But one area I chose to focus on is cooking. So far, I have three goals:
- have fun creating menus
- eat at home more often
- host friends for meals
The way I see it, my taking on a greater cooking role in the house has several benefits:
- Dave gets a break
- we save money on meals out
- I gain useful skills
- I use skills I already have (hello, baking!)
- I have another creative outlet
- I can nurture my friends with food
I started by cleaning out our kitchen cabinets. I have to enjoy a kitchen space to spend time in it, so I pulled everything out, scrubbed the shelves, got rid of a bunch of pans, etc, we don't use, and put the rest back. I don't have Before pics to share, so After pics are useless to you. But this pic is part of the next step:
Our cookbook shelves. Now that the kitchen's in shape, I can get down to choosing what I want to make. I'll cover some of these books in future posts, but they include a big collection of Hermes House books themed by cuisine or ingredient, three Fine Cooking annuals, a few professional books, and a lot of baking books (the top shelf).
Also at my disposal: a pile of magazines, including Cuisine at Home, this year's Fine Cooking issues, and Bon Appétit:
My first efforts will come from Fine Cooking Annual #1: sautéed tilapia over Swiss chard with tarragon butter, and brown rice salad with basil and pistachios.
Once the weather cools down, I want to have friends over on a regular basis for soup and fresh bread -- a meal I love and one that's easy to share (and add to, if they want to bring their own dishes).
Do you cook? Because you want to? What techniques or cuisines would you want to learn how to cook? Do you already specialize in something?
6 ate pie:
I LOVE to cook - and I seldom cook because of the time I spend trying to manage toomany careers I have at the moment. Hmm...think I need to change that!
I am totally drooling over your cookbook shelves - they look beautiful! I don't have many books, although I always check out the cookery section in any discount bookstores I visit. Instead I have two boxes of index-card style recipes which my mum collected (I think she was sent a new set every month or something), and they're wonderful. Great variety of recipes and all relatively straight-forward to follow. If there's something specific I fancy trying, I usually just do a Google search for a decent recipe.
I only got back into cooking regularly a couple of months ago, and I love it - there's nothing more satisfying than making something from scratch and being told how yummy it is! But I'm still a beginner really - for example I tend to cheat when it comes to pastry and so on. Still... a little bit at a time :)
We use fine cooking ALOT. Its nice to get a new batch of recipes every month. I think the nicest thing about cooking for your friends is that they return the favor...and usually pick recipes that you've never seen.
Christine - if you love it, you should do it. Just don't beat yourself up for NOT doing it. :)
Davina - Dave built the shelves; I love 'em. The sale/bargain section is a great place to find cookbooks, right? AllRecipes.com is a great site for recipes; so is Epicurious.com.
Dwayne - hey, if friends want to feed me, too, I'm totally down with that. :) p.s. the Fine Cooking Annuals are great because the recipes are indexed. You just have to order the "annual" and not the collection of bound magazines.
Ooo, what a great looking shelf! My goal is to learn how to prepare all the random cuts of beef and pork that live in our farm freezer. So far, I've discovered adding BBQ sauce always seems appropriate.
BBQ sauce is such a great go-to meal maker. Anything based on brown sugar and vinegar is bound to be excellent. :)
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