Someone's in the Kitchen with...

I love to cook! I may be obsessed. One of my favorite things to do is find new recipes online and I have a very long list of ones that I want to try. It's especially fun now that I have all of this new stuff for my kitchen, some of which I still haven't gotten a chance to use. However, at this point in my life, I'm not a particularly good cook. Don't get me wrong, I can follow a recipe with the best of 'em and come up with something really yummy, but I'm not good at coming up with stuff myself and putting a bunch of ingredients together and coming up with a great new recipe. But I really want to be one of those people who can do that. I'd really love to someday when I have the time (you know, since life tends to get LESS busy as you go) to take a couple cooking classes and really get into the swing of things.

I like to get involved in moderately complicated recipes that require a lot of ingredients, but I rarely have the opportunity to get into that. For now, I'm somewhat stuck with my real quick, real easy dinners. I know that I could always make a big dinner if I wanted, but since I don't get to have Jarrod, or anyone for that matter, join me, I just can't find the motivation. Spending a lot of time in the kitchen isn't particularly fun by itself, but the reward of having a great meal to share with someone makes it worth it. Making it for myself and leaving left overs for Jarrod just doesn't do it for me. So Friday's tend to be my big cooking days. I get a little rest in the afternoon, since I'll have been up since about 3am, and put something together for when Jarrod comes home that evening. Our weekends have been so busy that Saturday evenings we tend to eat out or with someone else. At least there's usually never time to spend actually cooking. And Sundays are our "do nothing" day of the week, especially since it's a short day for me and I have to be in bed so early. So I'm hoping for the day to come where I can cook meals any day of the week and have someone there to share it with. I'd love so much to be able to have dinner dates during the week! It's amazing the little things in life that you miss once you can't do them.

So last month I set the goal of making something out of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Well I had no idea what I was getting myself into! Most of the recipes really aren't that bad at first glance, but once you start going through them, you realize that several times throughout the recipe, it refers you to another recipe on another page, so suddenly your one simple recipe has turned into about 4 much more complicated recipes. They're really the type of thing that you need a lot of time (and ingredients... and specific cooking accessories) to accomplish, and as I've explained, cooking time is just not in the cards for me right now. But nevertheless, I accomplished this goal (albeit a day late, but who's paying that close attention?) last week by making the Chocolate Almond cake and it is AH-SO-GOOD! I even put my own little twists in it by substituting a couple of ingredients and putting things together a little differently. I figure that's the point of a recipe anyways. It's "more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules" (a great movie reference included!).

But this cake is so rich! I don't think there's anyway that we'll be able to eat the whole thing, because as a normal cake is 8 slices, this one is more like 30 since you have to cut them so small! But I felt very domestic making it. I melted my own chocolate, pulverized my own almonds, and beat together my own icing (over ice!). Plus, I finally got to use the beautiful cake platter I received from the wedding! I look forward to someday having the opportunity to put together great meals for my family. My mom always had great home cooked meals for us everyday after school. I hope I'm in a place someday where I can actually do that. But for now, I'll have to put my desire for dinner parties and cooking clubs aside and look forward to the day where I can slave away in the kitchen with the best of 'em. Ahh the finer things of life...

Yummy!