Saturday, March 12, 2011

Child's Play


I may have mentioned something along these lines before, but I was at the supermarket today collecting together bits and pieces for the week, and...well. Before this diet, I never ever could have imagined feeling such joy all thanks to finding some fresh asparagus in the fruit and veg section. Just...yeah. What the hell. My sister actually made the comment on facebook the other night, too, that she couldn't imagine me eating prawns; she was surprised to be presented with photographic evidence of that very fact. And certainly before now, I couldn't have imagined voluntarily eating prawns. It's not that I ever disliked them, they were just...not something I considered eating. And yet here we are -- I was in fact so excited by the asparagus that I took the defrosted prawns I'd intended for tonight's dinner and whipped them up for lunch instead; tonight I am having my pizza with fresh asparagus for the cheesy side dish. And I will have to hunt out some of the schniztel I have frozen in order to have my asparagus roll-ups for dinner tomorrow night. And I think I'll have prawns for lunch again tomorrow. Go figure, yeah?

But I was thinking yesterday again of how different things are, cooking-wise. I keep flip-flopping over using my new roulade dish; there's a coffee and chocolate roulade I want to make mostly because it's flourless, but it's a bit more of a pain in the ass than the ones with flour in. But I want to break in my new dish, so there you go. While reading that recipe, I found a chocolate orange angel cake recipe that's a smidgeon less egg happy than the recipe I got with my angel food cake tin, and would also allow me to break in my sugar thermometer, so...and I also have had the urge for the last two weeks to make biscotti, possibly because the recipe I have is the only one I've got that really uses a good chunk of demerara sugar. Well, except for the rhubarb crumble one, but I froze the rhubarb my workmate gave me last week because even though I dislike rhubarb I actually want to try it this time. So, I've saving it. Probably I'll make jambalaya with oysters and then have rhubarb crumble for dessert. Spoken as the girl who's never cared much for either oysters or rhubarb, it's all a bit wtf, yes.

So, yeah, I don't know. But it occured to me yesterday that when I was small, I went through a phase of writing "recipes." I know I still have the exercise books that have them in, because I purposely kept all my writing books, but they're packed away in the barn somewhere and even though I have the costume and everything, it's a bit too Lara Croft to try and retrieve them myself. I'd like to see some of them again. They're not in the least sensible, mind you; I didn't know how to bake when I was seven years old, except in the most general of terms. I just wrote recipes because it amused me. But here we are now. Our true natures will always out, I guess? Not that I have been writing recipes or anything. But I suspect if I keep up with this cooking lark -- and I will, because it's what is going to get me through the rest of my life -- I will start adapting and making my own recipes. Again, that's not something I would have picked back when I first considered this diet. And you know, it's a little scary to think how long ago that was -- although I only started in September, it would have been about May when I first started considering Cohens. So, I don't know. Time moves too fast.

But I still do remember episodes from my childhood with clarity, despite the general sluggishness of my diet-brain, and I laughed to recall my first true baking-memory. I had baked before this, of course, but always under the guidance of my mother. The first time my elder brother and I decided to bake on our own, however, we had a misadventure in banana cake -- we apparently had no idea of the difference between self-raising and plain flour. So, our cake was roughly the thickness and consistency of tyre rubber. We ate it all the same. Because if you cover even actual tyre rubber in copious amounts of thick and delicious chocolate icing, well, any kid's gonna love that. I suppose it helps that I believe that licking the icing bowl was the only reason we wanted to make the cake in the first place...

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