The New Oven Has Arrived

More like, life took a huge turn but things have finally settled! What’s been going on with the old oven lately? I don’t know, but I hope the new people are treating it as well as I did (or perhaps, better – as in cleaning it more often). Yep…life just got a little crazy and probably the biggest part was moving (back home!). Jobs lost, jobs found, jobs changing. Packing, more packing, unpacking, organizing. Looking to buy a house, not buying a house. Too many hours worked, not enough hours worked. It’s been all over the place. All the craziness finally settled and the RT and I took a Hawaiian vacation. I want to go again! It was amazing. And we came back engaged! It was perfect.

So now, as the wildest, weirdest, fastest, craziest spring/summer ever is coming to a close (can it pleeeaaaaase be fall yet?) I’ve been able to catch my breath, relax a bit, and get back to cooking and baking more regularly. And let me tell YOU, wait until you see my new fancy oven! I don’t think it hates me, but I think that’s because it’s smarter than me. It does everything but talk. Instead of the jarring “BRRZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT” of my last oven, this one goes “ting tong ting tong ting tong ” when my cookies are done. It also knows how to clean itself. It’s properly vented (through the microwave!), it has a glass cooktop, and 44 buttons, most of which I haven’t used. It’s also brand new and still (mostly) shiny.

What I’m trying to get at here, is that we moved into a brand new condo and all the appliances are state of the art and I don’t understand half of what they do. However, I have much more (granite!!) counter space, so cooking is a little nicer in the new place.

I’ve tried a few new things – some of which were good, some were pretty much failures (yes, I failed at buttercream frosting. I thought that was a relatively simple thing to make?!). My latest project is a new cast iron skillet that I bought to replace my old frying pan, once I found bits of Teflon peeling off into my stir fry. Anyway, this skillet weighs probably about 15 pounds and is pretty intimidating. I think I’ve screwed up with it a couple times so now I’m off to “season it” again, whatever that means. How did people survive before Google?

Much more to come. It’s good to be back!

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Here We Go

I’ve been thumbing through cookbooks like mad lately. If there’s one thing I’m learning, it’s that there is a whole lot of food in this world and I can’t possibly think how I’m going to cook it all. Here goes nothing…

 

When the stress started to pile up in my life, thanks mostly to my job, I started searching for an outlet. Two of my favourite hobbies (music and photography) weren’t cutting it anymore, as my job demands all my creativity – all day, every day. So I needed something else.

At the same time, I started to dread coming home after a stressful day to a paper bag of deep-fried grease, a pizza box, or an expensive night out at a restaurant. So I rummaged around in the bookcase and found the cookbook my Mom gave me when I moved out – the 12th edition of the Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book. I leafed through it, sticking post-its to the recipes that sounded good and looked easy, and went grocery shopping. I ventured out of the spaghetti sauce and granola bar aisles for almost the first time, but it proved to be expensive. My kitchen cupboards were pretty empty, considering I had no flour or sugar, no cooking oil, hardly any herbs or spices…no staples of any kind, really (I should be honest – I didn’t know what staples were and I’m not really sure if I do now). After I got home with all the food, I had to go shopping again so I could buy some things to cook it with (you know, like measuring cups and a spatula and a wooden spoon…you don’t need any of those things for Kraft Dinner so I had managed to survive pretty well).

That was a couple months ago, and here I am – not starved, apartment not burned down, no trips to the ER with food poisoning, nobody – I mean, hardly anybody – fake smiling their way through a meal…clearly this is the measure of success. Right?

So here it is! This is a food blog where you can watch me stumble my way through the kitchen, where I might come up with some good food to share and will definitely come up with some accidents to laugh at. If I disappear completely, that means one of those accidents resulted in the afore-mentioned food poisoning or apartment burning.

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