I baked cookies yesterday. Hold your applause. They were just oatmeal cookies. Oatmeal cookies are like the Blue Apron of the baking world. No thought required. The most difficult step is finding the measuring cups.
You all already know I enjoy my time in the kitchen but it’s almost always cooking. Baking is a whole different animal. It requires measuring stuff, preheating the oven, using the timer even. As a person who spent his whole career in a regimented, scientific occupation you’d think the most comfortable thing I could do in the kitchen is fall into the baking regimen. Nope, I prefer the loosey-goosey world of cooking.
Maybe that’s because I enjoy the freedom of modifying the dish I’m working on based on what’s fresh, what’s handy, what’s tasting good. Maybe it’s because most of the dishes I started out cooking were family recipes which changed as the family moved from Italy to America and ingredients changed based on what was available. Or maybe it was because some of those recipes were written in a combination of Italian and English and we weren’t always sure what was supposed to go into that pot so we improvised.
Or maybe that’s because it’s just the way I’m wired.
While I was deciding if I wanted to weigh or measure my dry ingredients I did some thinking about just that. Does our personality reflect our cooking style – and shouldn’t it also compare to our chosen lifestyle? Here’s what I came up with. . . . Maybe.
Take me for the first example. Even though I decided on keeping the wolves from my door in the highly regulated, policed, and exacting world of health care I tend to keep most of the rest of my life in the “let’s see what’s up” end of the spectrum. Back in the day when I actually made plans my idea of making plans (unless it involved non-refundable air fare), was “hey I heard about blah-blah-blah on the radio this morning, let’s go!” Thus my life in the kitchen is more a matter of “hmm, I wonder what’s in the refrigerator that hasn’t changed color yet, let’s eat!” And 9,999 times out of 10,000 it will be good.
Consider the ex. I’ll not be bad-mouthing anybody here. I’m just using her as an example. Her idea of spontaneous was using only two sources of information for research on a place, restaurant, movie, or wall-covering. But boy could she bake. Pies, cakes, breads, cookies. If it involved a rolling pin (no, I won’t go there), she had it mastered.
Now, let’s look at the daughter. The mix of the aforementioned Thing One and Thing Two. On one hand she’s creative enough to have selected one of the most imaginative fields you can imagine to make a living at and is making a living at it. On the other, she’s making a living at it by working for herself and manages to handle all the requirements of self-employment successfully enough to still make a living at it. Her style in the kitchen? She can bake a mall-worthy cinnamon roll in the morning and finesse her way through a dinner for four with whatever might be in the pantry after not shopping for two weeks in the evening. Living at both poles and baking and cooking with aplomb.
I guess that’s make her sort of a hybrid.
That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?
It’s fitting that Christmas and Valentine’s share people’s affection for romance, or at least for a desire to formally get together. Both celebrations focus on love. Unfortunately, when you don’t have a focus for your love on Valentine’s Day you probably notice it more.
So my advice to any guys reading this (and that includes any guys whose girls have not so surreptitiously passed this under their noses), is don’t wait for the boy does something stupid step and move right to boy apologizes. Heavens know we’ve done something stupid whether girl noticed it or not. If you really have any desire to move onto boy and girl live happily ever after, don’t take any chances. Make love, not excuses.
Thanksgiving Day parade. Gimbels beat him by four years on that one. Again anyway, my Gimbels card had none of the modern improvements like the RFID chip and magnetic strip, the issuer ID and hologram, the CVV (that three or f
Ok, food hasn’t always been honest. Sweetbreads don’t come from the bakery. Head cheese doesn’t start out as milk. Neither does soy milk. And don’t bother to bring up lady fingers. But for the most part when you see something that isn’t it usually says so, like salt substitute or butter flavor popcorn.
All that thinking about North Pole, Alaska and how names are given to places got me thinking about just what “Punxsutawney” means. So I looked that up too. It means “land of the sandflies.” Punxsutawney was a 1700 era settlement of the Delaware nation and presumably named by them. I’m not really in a place to question their observations and aptitude for naming places, but I don’t understand how a clearing on the edge of the Allegheny Forrest, in the mountains, over 300 miles from any ocean, over 900 miles to any water hot enough to have a sand beach presumably with flies, could be considered the “land of the sandflies.” The “land of” would indicate that whatever comes after “of” is so indigenous to that area that one cannot think of the “land” without automatically thinking of the “of.” I don’t know about you but Punxsutawney Sandflies doesn’t fall from my lips instinctively. Not even the local high school picked the sandfly as its mascot even considering the origin of its town’s moniker. (In fact, they are the Punxsutawney Chucks, as in woodchucks, as in groundhog.)
And that was it for car radio until those high school years. Then the changes came fast and furious. Nobody’s factory model was good enough. The aftermarket offerings included AM, AM-FM, 8-Track, and that newest alternative, the cassette player. Cassettes were cool. They let you listen to “your music” instead of relying on the DJ choices on the radio, they didn’t skip when you couldn’t dodge the potholes fast enough like the 8-track players, and the really good ones include auto-reverse so you could listen to the same album over and over without even having to pull the cassette out and flip it over.
The Real Reality Show Blog 