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blackthornglade
What was your first memory of cooking?
The first time I tried to make an angel food cake. I failed. I had yet to learn that "stiffly beaten egg whites" (angel food cake is egg whites, cream of tartar, sugar, and flour, nothing more) are basically the texture of whipped cream, and not merely beaten until they are a bit thicker liquid then they are straight out of the shell. If you make angel food cake batter with that, you get... some kind of weird cakey omelet. (I am not sure if I managed to separate all the eggs without getting in any yolks. If I was young enough to make the mistake about "stiffness", I don't think I can have done, but I might have managed it...)
Also around this time, I think, was when I wondered what the moving beaters on the hand mixer felt like, and decided to touch them while they were running. They of course swiftly drew my finger in between them. Hurt like a son of a bitch. Fortunately, I didn't break the finger, but I have a fairly dramatic memory of my mother yelling "JIM!!!!" to get my dad's attention when she couldn't free me from the Beaters of Death. (This is very odd and serious - my parents almost never refer to each other by name, even in the third person, preferring to say "your mother" and "your father". When talking to other people my mother does say "my husband Jim" sometimes, but often just says "my husband". I think this may be why I often feel weird addressing people by name, now that I think about it, but I digress muchly.)
Who had the most influence on your cooking?
My mother. After the aforementioned angel food cake fiasco, she decided that she had better teach me how to actually bake and cook if she didn't want to deal with more messes like that.
Do you have any early photographic evidence of your early exposure to cooking, and would you like to share it?
There's a few pictures of things I made, I think, like cakes decorated for various occasions, but I don't have any of them handy. I don't think there's any pictures of me cooking. (There is definitely a picture of the time I decided to put a candle for every year when my mother turned 45 or something... relative to the size of the cake, it looked like the flaming thing from Bilbo Baggins' 111th birthday party!)
Do you suffer from any cooking phobia ... a dish that makes your palms sweat?
Eh? No. There are some things I know are beyond my skill level, but what I have is good enough to mean I can cook pretty much anything that's not downright outlandish. (Cooking without a recipe is something else again; I can do so with entrees, just throwing things together, but the only thing I think I could bake without a recipe is bread. Thus, I have the skill level that anyone up to the turn of the century would certainly have considered to be so basic as to not be worth mentioning. ^_^)
What would be your most valued or used kitchen gadgets and/or what was the biggest letdown?
Most used? Probably just the mixer. We don't make use of a lot of fancy cooking equipment in my house. It's a sad thing that the bowl on our food processor is cracked, though, because it means you can't process anything liquid in it (no pureed soups, or even pesto, for that matter).
Name some funny or weird food combinations/dishes you like - and probably no one else!
I don't have anything really weird. I am notsaizai, aka "Iron Chef WTF". ;)
What are the three eatables or dishes you simply can’t live without?
Um. Pass.
What dish would you probably never eat?
I don't like slimy food; tentacles (squid) and snails are out. However, I used to hate mushrooms and then one day suddenly changed, so who knows.
What is your own signature dish?
Dunno. Magic Vegetable Surprise Soup? (Which is basically "Buy whatever looks good at the grocery store. Cut it up. Put it in a pot. Realize that you now have a pot entirely full of veggies, with almost no room for broth, which is going to be stew more than it's soup and the leftovers of which will likely go bad before you can eat them all. Shrug and plunge on regardless.") Askenotsola - besides me, who is too close to see, he tends to get the brunt of my cooking. ;)
blackthorngladeWhat was your first memory of cooking?
The first time I tried to make an angel food cake. I failed. I had yet to learn that "stiffly beaten egg whites" (angel food cake is egg whites, cream of tartar, sugar, and flour, nothing more) are basically the texture of whipped cream, and not merely beaten until they are a bit thicker liquid then they are straight out of the shell. If you make angel food cake batter with that, you get... some kind of weird cakey omelet. (I am not sure if I managed to separate all the eggs without getting in any yolks. If I was young enough to make the mistake about "stiffness", I don't think I can have done, but I might have managed it...)
Also around this time, I think, was when I wondered what the moving beaters on the hand mixer felt like, and decided to touch them while they were running. They of course swiftly drew my finger in between them. Hurt like a son of a bitch. Fortunately, I didn't break the finger, but I have a fairly dramatic memory of my mother yelling "JIM!!!!" to get my dad's attention when she couldn't free me from the Beaters of Death. (This is very odd and serious - my parents almost never refer to each other by name, even in the third person, preferring to say "your mother" and "your father". When talking to other people my mother does say "my husband Jim" sometimes, but often just says "my husband". I think this may be why I often feel weird addressing people by name, now that I think about it, but I digress muchly.)
Who had the most influence on your cooking?
My mother. After the aforementioned angel food cake fiasco, she decided that she had better teach me how to actually bake and cook if she didn't want to deal with more messes like that.
Do you have any early photographic evidence of your early exposure to cooking, and would you like to share it?
There's a few pictures of things I made, I think, like cakes decorated for various occasions, but I don't have any of them handy. I don't think there's any pictures of me cooking. (There is definitely a picture of the time I decided to put a candle for every year when my mother turned 45 or something... relative to the size of the cake, it looked like the flaming thing from Bilbo Baggins' 111th birthday party!)
Do you suffer from any cooking phobia ... a dish that makes your palms sweat?
Eh? No. There are some things I know are beyond my skill level, but what I have is good enough to mean I can cook pretty much anything that's not downright outlandish. (Cooking without a recipe is something else again; I can do so with entrees, just throwing things together, but the only thing I think I could bake without a recipe is bread. Thus, I have the skill level that anyone up to the turn of the century would certainly have considered to be so basic as to not be worth mentioning. ^_^)
What would be your most valued or used kitchen gadgets and/or what was the biggest letdown?
Most used? Probably just the mixer. We don't make use of a lot of fancy cooking equipment in my house. It's a sad thing that the bowl on our food processor is cracked, though, because it means you can't process anything liquid in it (no pureed soups, or even pesto, for that matter).
Name some funny or weird food combinations/dishes you like - and probably no one else!
I don't have anything really weird. I am not
saizai, aka "Iron Chef WTF". ;)What are the three eatables or dishes you simply can’t live without?
Um. Pass.
What dish would you probably never eat?
I don't like slimy food; tentacles (squid) and snails are out. However, I used to hate mushrooms and then one day suddenly changed, so who knows.
What is your own signature dish?
Dunno. Magic Vegetable Surprise Soup? (Which is basically "Buy whatever looks good at the grocery store. Cut it up. Put it in a pot. Realize that you now have a pot entirely full of veggies, with almost no room for broth, which is going to be stew more than it's soup and the leftovers of which will likely go bad before you can eat them all. Shrug and plunge on regardless.") Ask
enotsola - besides me, who is too close to see, he tends to get the brunt of my cooking. ;)
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Date: Jul. 7th, 2005 11:56 pm (UTC)From: