Well, it’s easy to tell by the number of viewers and comments I received that most of you prefer to read about food and cooking as opposed to politics. I don’t blame you.
I have to admit that I love to cook and I like to eat what I cook. As a result, I read a lot about cooking. I subscribe to any number of cooking magazines and websites for recipes. I stared looking through a couple of them yesterday evening and noticed one strange thing. They all have an abundance of advertising for cat foods. Little Friskies, Tender Vittals and such. Makes me somewhat nervous. I mean here is a photo ad for some stuff your cat would love to eat across the page from a great casserole recipe. Yummy.
Our kids are grown so there are only the two of us to cook for. I can’t seem to find many recipes for just two, so I end up cooking a lot more and we take it next door to some of our neighbors. I will say they are very vocal about what they like or don’t like. I made a dill pickle soup a few months ago, not a word. Then when the banana bread went over, the phone lit up.
My wife always knows when I make something, I’m not really proud of or really sure about. I tend to get a little too excited for her to try something I haven’t made before and she gets suspicious very quickly. No fool her.
This past weekend I tried a recipe for some kind of snack balls or bars made from garbanzo beans, oatmeal, vanilla and peanut butter. They looked a little weird and she was very hesitant to try one out. I thought they were great and made great noises praising their taste. This is a sure sign to her that they might be a loser. But as it turned out, they kind of grew on you once you had eaten one and soon all of them were long gone.
Another problem these days seems to be cookbooks. In the old days, you needed cookbooks to tell you what to buy and how to make whatever you wanted to make. Now days, you just Google up what you have and bam, here is a recipe for it in a matter of seconds. I don’t know why we even have any cookbooks in the house, since we seldom use them for the things we like to eat.
To prove what I am talking about, I just Googled ‘Pork and Peanut Butter’ and guess what? I got a bunch of recipes for pork with a peanut butter sauce and another one for pork -peanut butter curry…Yuck.
No sense in trying that one on my wife, it won’t fly.
Seriously cooking can be fun…kind of like that program called ‘Chopped”. Let’s see what can we make out of cornbread mix, tofu, cranberry sauce, chocolate chips and coconut flakes.
“What did you make Chef #1?”
“My creation was a cornbread pie filled with chocolate chips and coconut, topped with a luscious cranberry reduction sauce ….just like me dear old Maw in Ireland used to make when we were kids. “
“Well, that’s a winner…what do you intend to do with your $10,000 prize money?”
“I’ll be going back to dear old Dublin to open me own restaurant, start a foundation for crippled emus, and help my maw with that heart operation she needs along with her new roof.”
Bet he never leaves New York.
But I hear people all the time telling me…’I don’t know how to cook.”
My answer is simple…can you read?
If you can read, you can cook.
Can you cook well? That’s another story. But like anything else, the more times you do it, the better you get. In most things, for me sky diving was a one-time deal.
The tools we have available today are marvelous. InstaPots, High speed blenders, mixers and juicers microwaves and air fryers. It is really hard to mess up if you follow the directions the right way. Of course, if you choose to make something really horrible on purpose, then you can’t be helped.
I do think that is the case for a lot of people…..I suspect that was the case for my ex-wife.
She could burn Jello.
Trust me, that’s hard to do.
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