Cooking.

Most, if not all, of my extended family members like(d) to cook. On both sides of the family, we had our specialties; cakes or cookies, pierogies from scratch, cabbage rolls, homemade candies and chocolates.. really, it’s not so much that I’m genetically predisposed to being chubby it’s that I’m genetically predisposed to liking food.

Over the years, since leaving home in my late teen years, I’ve branched out from “add water and microwave” foods and into the sort of cooking that requires actual ingredients. I’ve slowly acquired various tools, implements and appliances. I’ve been exceedingly grateful for the stack of inherited baking trays and mixing bowls that I hauled from place to place after my grandparents died.

I remember when Coffee moved in with me, and my ex, and expressed surprise at the variety of pots and pans I had in the cupboards. He said he didn’t really cook so much as reheat things (“add water and microwave”) or eat take-out in his bachelor life. It was around this time that I was really starting to get ‘into’ the whole cooking thing – we had a large enough kitchen to spread out the pans and trays and go to town – so he’d sometimes help me out a bit with various steps in the dinner-making process.

Eventually, though, we started cooking and baking more often. We shrank down our prepackaged (“microwave until fully heated”) foods and started investigating various ingredients that we had never touched in the past. I remember looking through cookbooks and finding things that sounded good, but looked too complicated to make, and quickly closing the book again.

And now there doesn’t seem to be anything too complicated and it’s awesome.

Cooking, and baking, are all about following the instructions. At least, following them the first time. After that, when you know how it turns out, it’s okay to start experimenting with the ingredients and the textures and the flavours and the spices.

There are some foods that are still off-limits to me, requiring specialty tools (like a food torch, say) that I can’t justify purchasing unless I’m positive I’ll use it more than once or twice. There are some that will require me to have a few hours free in which to mix and stir and whatever-else-is-required. And there are some foods that we can’t easily make in our current teensy, teeny, tiny kitchen.

When we finished making the baklava yesterday, and after we had tasted some searing-hot honey glazed crispy flakey ohgod.. wait, what was I saying? Oh! Right! After we tasted the baklava yesterday and realized how little effort it really took to make it, I was giddy again about how much fun it is to cook and bake. It’s not that we’ll be making baklava every week, or even every month, but it’s good to know that we CAN if we WANT to.

The only thing currently on my “want to make and never have before” list is.. donuts. The kind that you fry in oil. I am not a big fan of hot oil cooking and we do not own a deep frier to do all the work for me. But I think that I’m going to try ‘em sometime this summer, along with the various other things I’d like to attempt to make, bake or cook. I’m hoping to do some canning and preserving this summer, too, both from our garden and from the market – something I’ve never done by myself and which I only vaguely remember doing with my mother when I was very, very young.

That reminds me – I need to go and look at the recipe for the falafel we’re having tonight for dinner..