Inspired by Kate from Four Obsessions, here are seven food-related things to share.
1. From an early age I was taught what was good to eat in the north woods and how to find it. If you're walking with me and suddenly I dive into the bushes and come up with a handful of berries, you'll understand. Locally this means that the first day of blueberry, raspberry, juneberry, and strawberry season are holidays, and I employ a small army of berry-picking advance scouts to keep me informed of when opening day is and how conditions are.
2. When I was a kid we made cookies out of acorns once. It took a long time to gather them, and a lot of work to process them, and when they finally got into the oven somehow (mysteriously) they got scorched. I've never had the need to repeat that experience.
3. The first complicated recipe I tried was sauce Bearnaise, using a recipe from Scientific American's The Amateur Scientist (1979 Dec, pg 178; 1981 Jan, pg 164). It turned out pretty well.
4. After having had sweet dumpling squash, I can't go back to ever eating acorn squash again.
5. We are vegetarians at home, but I'm a confirmed omnivore, and so you'll see restaurant reviews of meat dishes but only vegetarian recipes.
6. I'm bad at doing recipes because I hardly ever measure anything anymore - mostly I spice things by eye and smell, and as often as not the recipes I end up with are a description of what I did this one time with the food on hand and not instructions for what to go buy. I'm sure that there's some recipe vocabulary in some language that I'm missing which could make them better, other than "cook until it smells good".
7. I've taken to blogging recipes in part because it's a convenient way to look them up the next time I need to cook them, since I don't always know which cookbook on our shelf has the recipe on the menu plan for the week.
Tag: Jim Benson (e.g. "stir-fried wikipedia with pimentoes"), KitchenChick (my reliable source for Paczki Day information), and The Cottage Smallholder (who got tagged already)
