Fun in the kitchen!

I'm a passable cook, or so I'm told. I maintain that Bam is far better in the kitchen than I am, because she really does make fantastic food. I can't remember what she made, but a few weeks ago I ended up leaning over to the belly and yelling "This is why your friends will want to stay for dinner!" - Once our little one starts to get a taste of her mom's cooking, she's going to be set forever.

When I cook, I have a few terrible habits. The main one is that I cook for me - everything is seasoned to my taste. On the upside, it means I'll eat anything I've cooked. Literally. Even if it's burnt and crunchy, I'll eat it. Used too much spicy stuff? (Bam has a magic Chinese chili sauce for making sushi with, it's like flaming death in a bottle... and I *always* use too much) I'll eat it. I'm totally indiscriminate when it comes to my own cooking.

The other terrible habit I have is kinda related to that. I'm a taster! I have to taste anything I'm making whenever I judge it "safe". Obviously not if it's raw meat or something like that, but once I judge it ready for sampling then anything goes. Not just the dish I'm making either, I'll liberally sample the ingredients. I've drunk soy sauce and Tabasco straight, if we get new seasonings or spices I have to taste it "raw". My theory is that I need to know what that specific taste is so that my brain can file it and I can pull it out when something I've made needs *just that* taste. It's a good thing. Really.

Last week we ordered Chinese. We don't do it very often, but Bam needed sushi and we had some spare cash, so we ordered some dinners. American Chinese comes in much bigger food portions than British Chinese, but oddly the rice is a lot smaller portion. Swings and roundabouts! Anyway, Bam had sweet and sour chicken, and they forgot the sweet and sour sauce.

She got a nice little tray of chicken nuggets!

Of course, she'd nommed sushi so we didn't find out until the next day. I rummaged around, and found a simple enough sweet and sour sauce recipe so I thought I'd give it a go... and it was delicious! That recipe is now safely in the recipe box-which-is-also-currently-a-genealogy-box-because-I-lost-the-proper-one.

On the other hand... I wanted potatoes and onions tonight. I think it's the Irish in me, but when we get to the end of the month and food is running a bit low, I demand potatoes. so I chopped up a couple and decided to fry them off as cubes... and promptly made them crispy but near enough raw inside. No problem! Little more oil, dropped the heat and covered the pan... now they were cooked but soggy... No problem! Crank up the heat and take off the lid...

And they burnt. Those potatoes were sullen and insolent!

But not severely enough to bother me, and I'm eating them anyway. They're not too bad, but need more salt and spices... a little Tabasco... some Tony's... a little bacon....

Another day :)