learn to cook. Really cook.

I love to make soup. There is something so wonderful about adding disparate ingredients to a pot, adding spice and heat, and enjoying the deliciousness in a bowl and spoon later on. Apart from those made with split peas, I’ve never met a soup I didn’t like.

Today, I’m cooking up a big pot of potato-leek soup—but this ain’t no delicate, “ladies who lunch” bit of a taste served in a china dish. This is a selection of hearty, roasted vegetables pureed to perfection.

• 8 large potatoes, peeled and roughly chopped (I prefer Yukon golds)
• 1 sweet onion, diced
• 1 parsnip, peeled and chopped
• 3 carrots, peeled and chopped
• 1 purple turnip, peeled and chopped

1. Mix the above ingredients with two tablespoons of olive oil, sea salt, and cracked black pepper. Place them into a greased, shallow roasting pan, arranged in a single layer. Roast in the middle rack of a 400 degree oven for 30 minutes, stirring every ten.
2. While the root vegetables are roasting, de-grit, and finely chop 3 large leeks (white parts only). In a large kettle or dutch oven, saute the leeks with two tablespoons of minced garlic in olive oil over medium heat.
3. When the leeks have wilted, add the roasted vegetables to the pot. Add salt and pepper as desired, 1 teaspoon of sweet paprika (I prefer Spanish to Hungarian), and a tiny pinch of coriander. Stir to combine. Add enough broth to cover the vegetables (I use a 32-ounce carton of broth and make up any necessary difference with filtered water), place a lid over the pot, and set the heat to medium high. When the contents reach a boil, reduce the heat to low and simmer for an hour.
4. Blend the soup in batches (or use an immersion blender if you have one) until it is completely smooth, free from lumps and chunks. Serve in large bowls, topped with sour cream and minced chives, or shredded mozzarella cheese and parsley, or seeded, grated baby tomatoes.

This is a particularly starchy soup, so I usually have sliced fruit or braised greens with it, but I was also in a bread baking mood today. Since cranberries have appeared at the market in preparation for the holiday season, I made a loaf of cranberry-orange quick bread.

• 1-1/2 c unbleached white bread flour
• 1/2 c graham flour
• 1 c cane sugar
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 tsp finely shredded orange peel (I use dried)
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1 beaten egg
• 1 c orange juice
• 1/4 c cooking oil
• 1 c cranberries, halved
• 3/4 c chopped pecans and almonds (mixed in parts to your taste)

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees; Grease and set aside a loaf pan
2. Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, orange peel and cinnamon in a large bowl. Make a well in the center and set aside.
3. In a medium bowl, combine the egg, orange juice, and oil. Add the egg mixture to the flour mixture all at once, and stir just until combined. The batter should be lumpy, but all of the dry ingredients should be incorporated.
4. With a rubber spatula, fold the cranberries and nuts into the batter, then por the batter into the loaf pan, scraping the sides of the bowl clean.
5. Bake at 350 degrees for an hour, until a knife or toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool in a pan for ten minutes, then remove the loaf to a wire rack.

This bread is best after sitting for several hours; it’s possible to taste the baking powder bitterness if the loaf is sliced before being thoroughly cooled.

I wanna learn so I can be a more interesting/practical person. So I can cook for myself and others if need be.

ill try by learning a recipe a week!

I would like to start by learning the basic Indian and Indian Chinese dishes and slowly graduate to more complex stuff. But the real challange lies in letting my mother give up the kitchen to me even for an hour.

I still don’t have my own kitchen, but I do have a teacher. I guess I’ll be cooking at his house.

I’m very happy that there’s finally some progress on this goal.

I have so far learned how to cook 6 different pastas and Japanese…tomorrow will be Filipino dishes followed by Thai. So far so good. I have been able to replicate the dishes at home. I have also been collecting recipes and tips from friends who are good cooks. I am now beginning to believe that I can actually become a real good cook…although if my recipe book disappears, I think I will also lose the ability to cook for now anyways…am happy…am excited that I am able to serve my family good meals. Hoping to improve…improve…improve…

I’m having a hard time remembering how to cook.

That sounds bizarre, doesn’t it? I’m thirty-years old; I’ve enjoyed messing about in the kitchen to feed my friends and family since I was 10 and first made chocolate chip cookies all by myself. (Mom, Dad, I’m so sorry for mixing up the sugar and salt. Thank you still for tasting them with a straight face.) And yet, throughout the almost-six-months that I’ve lived in the city I have failed to put together a decent meal effortlessly.

My weird eating habits probably don’t help, nor does the fact that I gave away 4/5 of my cookbooks prior to moving (Rachel Ray, I really miss you right now), nor the fact that I’m suddenly intimidated by sensitive-new-age-guy Alton Brown, nor the fact that I’ve spent my few real “ooh, let’s make a real meal!” cooking evenings trying things I’ve never made before rather than old favorites. In other words, I’m making an enormous, not-all-that-tasty mess every time I try to feed myself of late, daily habits seem to be making the problem worse, and I’m quite piqued about the whole thing.

So, as with any situation, now that I’m irritated enough I’m taking action. I’ve subscribed to a couple of food blogs by seemingly ordinary, unpretentious people who knew nothing about cooking when they started and are quite interested in food now that they have a few years of practice under their belts. And I’m starting at the beginnings of their recipe archives, starting out with simpler, less-intimidating recipes from their earliest record-keeping months. Have planned my menu and placed my grocery order for this week, and am quite excited about the various cooking forays I have planned.

My qualifications for choosing a recipe: do I love the ingredients, or am I familiar with many while one piques my curiosity? Can the amounts be reduced, or will the meal hold up for left-overs or lunches? Can I salvage something if it goes horribly wrong?

• Jeanne’s Roast Chicken with apples and onions (I adore chicken, and now that it’s cool enough to have the oven on for two hours, it’s time for a roaster (and stock-making!))
• Mushroom-Barley Soup (Have never successfully made barley soup)
• Chopped Veggie Salad (Calls for chicken and avocado; how can you go wrong?)
• Pasta Carbonara (Reading made me realize that I would love to hang with the guys from The Paupered Chef. Also, the recipe calls for wine and I want to learn how to drink the stuff without choking.)

Pancakes are my fall-back if anything goes to hell. Delicious fallback! I also have serious plans to make pita sandwiches from leftover chicken, steel-cut oatmeal with fresh fruit for breakfast now that the weather has turned chill, and a pair of Bosc pairs to braise in remnants of the Seneca Lake wine.

Friends are welcome; entrance fee is music and laughter.

(First posted at Expetesso“)

I’ve had this goal on my list for ages, but I haven’t done anything about it yet. As I wrote elsewhere, I don’t have a kitchen, so I can’t do much about cooking and eating.

I hope I can survive on ready-to-eat food until I move and get a kitchen. I really want to learn to cook, and eat properly.

A light sandwich of peasant bread spread with pesto sauce and topped with Mozzarella cheeze. Toasted in the oven for ten minutes, this makes for a great quicky lunch.

Actually i am an okay cook and i love doing it but i can be quite unadventurous and stick to the tried and tested. I have been getting into baking lately which is cool….especially since i swore i would never bake again after a disastrous batch of scones that ended up in the bin when i was 14. hehehe..So i think my goal will be to learn some new recipes to add to my repertoire :-)

I’ve always known that there is a real cook in me, but the stumbling block has always been organizing the means of production, in this case, a proper space to work in. This weekend, my sister, who is an interior designer, told me she’d help get my tiny apartment kitchen, in working order. We are going to set a weekend to get going on my mini-renovations. My kitchen is very old and rather icky looking. I general stay out there. Also, my entire apartment has turned into a work space, paper everywhere, and I’m really not comfortable having people over. But I’m going to get going on this space thing bit by bit.