i have a space fleet

I'm in Texas for the summer, spending time with my family, and particularly my mum, who is reminding me more and more of Bella Swan's mother in the Twilight series. I love her, she's sweet, but she's incredibly naive about certain things, and I have no idea how she managed to live on her own for large parts of her life -- let alone to climb the ranks in the Army Chemical Corps, considering some of the bizarre beliefs she seems to have about actual chemistry these days. (Like expired titanium dioxide causing a white chocolate coffee bean to taste like raspberries. Sure, mum, more likely? It was a raspberry-flavoured white chocolate coffee bean.)

Part of taking care of my mum involves cooking. She used to cook sometimes when I was very little, and in fact did quite good souffles, but lately her recipes all end up as a bog-standard "casserole" that involves throwing everything into a casserole dish with the same boring herbs and baking it. I know her influence is mostly English and Western European, but sweet lord, there are herbs other than rosemary and thyme! Also, rice and pasta in the same dish? Eww. And because it's all one-dish stuff, everything tastes like everything else, so what's the point of eating different foods? I'm not a food snob by any means, but I don't want to eat carrots that taste like potatoes that taste like rice that tastes like chicken that tastes like rosemary, the leaves of which are dried and have to be picked out before they poke holes in my gums.

So lately, I've been learning to cook. It's shockingly easy! I've gotten several good recipes off f_w (omgz ILU "recipes in the comments" tag!), and Google is proving awesome not only at stalking people IRL, but at finding recipes for the random ingredients I have lying around. Joy of Cooking is rapidly becoming one of my favourite books, even though I have an old copy from like, the 1960s; I love the informational section and I like how there are alternatives and suggestions in a lot of the recipes.

I did Parmesan chicken last night -- the recipe looked good, but I only had drumsticks, and trying to get chunks of meat off drumsticks is an arduous process. I substituted flour for breadcrumbs, which probably would have been fine if I hadn't had a flour accident, and then tried to fix it by using more butter, meaning the dish had to cook longer to get it brown, and by then the tiny bits of meat from the drumsticks were getting tough. It was actually pretty good anyway, though it did taste a bit of flour, and if I'd had breasts or thighs I think it'd have been delicious.

I bought spinach at the grocery store, knowing that it's good for you but with no clue what I was going to do with it, and then I found this recipe for creamed spinach which is amazing. I only had one bunch of spinach, so I couldn't make very much, but it was still fantastic, and I'm going to buy a lot more spinach next trip.

I make curries a lot, because I like that you can throw a bunch of things in the pan and get a lot of flavours and it all tastes good. But I've only done meat curries, and I usually use coconut milk, which means sweet curry. Yogurt curry scares me! I did vegetable curry (heavily modified) on Sunday, though, using eggplant, spinach, and potatoes, with no sauce, and it was OM NOM NOM worthy. I only have yellow curry powder and red curry paste right now, so I need to find the Asian super market around here and pick up different curry mixes. I used to have a bunch of them, but I tossed most of them when I moved because I hardly ever cooked and they were getting stale.

I'm liking the whole vegetable thing, though. I have an electric steamer that I bought when I started college, because I knew I'd have to cook and it was super easy. It came with a rice/pasta bowl and a divider for separating foods, and is probably one of the best purchases I've ever made. I use it to cook rice and I do fresh vegetables with every meal. Fresh steamed broccoli is my one true vegetable love. (I had to use frozen broccoli once because I ran out of fresh; it wasn't nasty, but it was incredibly dull.) Also, string beans? So much better when they're not soggy and out of a can. Potatoes can also be cooked remarkably fast when cut up and steamed. Excellent, because I love potatoes but hate boiling them for hours.

I think I'm having a love-affair not so much with food as with the actual process. I like figuring out what flavours work together, what order to mix things in to get the best results, finding the balance between too long and not long enough. People say cooking is chemistry, but I never really believed it. I used to think cooking was pretty damn boring, and if I was in the kitchen at all it was only to like the bowl after making brownies. But now, I'm having fun with it, and if I had to compare it to science, I'd go for chemistry meets mechanical engineering. For me, cooking is an intuitive process: I have parts, I know what the results should be, and I make a lot of stuff up based on what I know should happen. I always read the notes in chemistry lab, but usually I'm the girl who refuses to read the manual because that would take the fun out of it. Similarly, unless it's finicky, I tend not to read recipes beyond the ingredients list and stuff like "bake at 400° for 1 hour". I'm treating cooking like DIY, and having only basic guidelines is more of a challenge, and yields more rewarding results when you end up with yummy foodz.