Culinary Success

I meant to take a photo of the dinner I created last night but forgot and now it's all gone.

*sigh*

Oh well, I'll tell you about it anyway. It was pasta with butternut squash and sausage.

Now, this is my self-improvement blog so I have to explain why this is self-improvement, and no, it's not just because I cooked. I've been trying to cook a lot lately, actually. And it's only halfway because I actually succeeded at cooking something tasty.

This event is primarily an example of self-improvement because for the first time ever I did not pick a recipe first and then go buy the ingredients to match. For the first time ever, I picked a recipe based on the ingredients I had available. Even better, I picked a recipe that used a large amount of ingredients that were old so I could use them before they went bad. And what's best of all!!! Rather than simply follow the recipe by the book, I put a little faith in my own skills of improvisation and changed the recipe to work around ingredients I didn't have and ingredients I thought would work better. Instead of chicken stock I used vegetable stock (because I thought it might be a little healthier) and instead of sage I used rosemary (because I was out of sage and didn't realize it...this actually didn't work out very well because where sage would have been soft leaves that would have diminished and been barely noticeable texture-wise, the rosemary announced itself quite angrily with small sharp twiggy pieces scattered throughout the soft pasta...taste-wise it was totally fantastic, though).

All this I am taking as a sign that I am growing up, cooking wise, at least. I'm making my own decisions instead of lazily putting blind faith in others and I'm learning to chose simple homey recipes that have a greater chance of success than the fancy master-chef recipes I've been prone to choose in recent past.

This bodes well for me.

I also made two different kinds of brownies within a week. I'm slowly but surely learning the hard and painful way what ingredients have what effects in the world of baking as well as sticking to my goal of baking as often as possible in an effort to try out the possible future career of a baker.

Wish me continued luck and fortitude!

LittleSpastic Out