i have a space fleet

In addition to cooking, I'm learning to garden. I planted garlic before I ran off to New York, and when I got back two weeks later, they had sprouted. I love cooking with garlic, and it's apparently good to grow in desert country because it likes dry soil, so I figured it'd be a good Texas plant. Also, it's super easy to grow; all you have to do is stick one of the cloves into some dirt and water it a little bit, and voila! (Protip: Plant about an inch deep or it can't sprout; the one at the back left is tiny because it was too deep and I only fished it out a couple of days ago — but look, it's sprouted already.)



I've also got an avocado seed trying to sprout, but I'm not sure if it'll work. The seed has cracked, but I don't see any roots appearing. I planted some nasturtiums and some passion flowers, but the seeds were more than ten years old and they haven't sprouted; I think they're probably bad by now. I might try some onions, and an orange tree. I have a peach seed in the fridge, but peaches are high maintenance! I'm looking for other easy things to grow; gardening is fun, but the less I'm obligated to take care of it, the more I will be willing to take care of it.

I got eggs and ground turkey at the store today, because I am going to make ravioli! It will have some combination of mushroom/ricotta/turkey; possibly turkey/ricotta in mushroom sauce? Or mushroom/ricotta with turkey. Dunno. I'm going to make the pasta myself, I think it'll be fun.

I need more food/plant icons to reflect my new hobbies. Hmm.

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.

( thoughts on foodz )

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.