While my beloved Edukator has been delving deep into his soul these past few days, taking a good hard look at himself, and generally preparing for the new year in an awe-inspiring spirit of quiet maturity and sober reflection...I've been baking things. And searching out shops that bake things. And reading about other people baking things. Hmmm. Two different sets of priorities are beginning to emerge here. To illustrate my point: on our recent New year's junket to Tours (all hail cheapie Euro-flights!), a ridiculously lovely medeival village in south-west France,
this was the kind of thing Edukator
wanted to take photos of:
...and this is what I
wanted to take photos of:
Good thing Edukator likes eating baked things, or we'd have absolutely nothing in common :)
Now in case all this food-porn sounds decidedly frivolous and decadent, here are some of the culinary challenges I've taken on and tackled this festive season (lest anyone suspects I've actually been enjoying my time off):
1) I roasted my own chestnuts. Given the sort of rampant foodie I've become, it was bound to happen one of these days.
2) I invented a graham-cracker substitute, in order to form the crust of my mother-in-law's world-famous Xmas "fiesta bars". I got a package of ginger snaps (the closest biscuit I could find to ye olde grahams taste-wise), wrapped them in two layers of plastic bags, and reduced them to crumbs by beating them with an empty wine-bottle. Which took a VERY long time. But my bicepts look incredible as a result.
3) since it's impossible to buy chocolate chips in anything larger than a 25g package, I hand-chopped two large 500g slabs...again for the fiesta bars. Advancing my carpal tunnel symptoms along nicely.
4) I baked gingerbread, poked holes in them, and strung them around the flat as cheap, festive decorations. Thank you, Nigella, Domestic Goddess indeed.
5) I don't have any of the right culinary equipment to bake. Which led to great creativity: the empty wine-bottle was my rolling pin, I tempered chocolate in the microwave, I used wine glasses as my cookie cutters. Liquids were measured using cleaned-out honey and jam pots. And all creaming and mixing was done by hand, which works up a sweat! No wonder people were thinner back in the day!
All of this, really, because I have tons of Christmas term homework I ought to be doing. Avoidance is a wonderful spur to my culinary creativity. There's nothing like a looming essay on the theatre of the oppressed to give me the urge to make marshmallows from scratch or bottle my own quince jam :)
3 comments:
For me, necessity is the mother of substandard baked goods. While I can do without measuring cups and such, I gotta have the mojo in my rolling pin.
ah yes, the pleasures of a good rolling pin. I'm currently on the lookout for a plain wooden cylindrical one that fits perfectly in my hand. But I certainly never enter the kitchen without my trusty Henkel knives...
I love my wife. What a creative problem solver and what delicious meals.
My strategy is quite different. It goes a little like this:
1. Open fridge.
2. Reach in.
3. Grasp randomly.
4. Examine food in hand and determine if it can be eaten immediately/warmed up quickly/put on bread.
5. Eat ojbect OR:
6. Order pizza.
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