The English Guy's Personal Blog » cooking

The Problem with Preparing Meals in Advance

richard — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:29:22 +0000

So I offered to cook for my parents tomorrow evening, it’s Father’s Day after all. I have it planned all out, and decided that today I’d do some cooking in advance to get it out of the way to make it easier on the day.

Problem is, I chose to cook the desserts. So marmalade muffins and chocolate fridge cake are now ready and filling the house with their smell. God what an idiot I am, I can’t eat this stuff but I have to torture myself with it until tomorrow night!

Cooking Blog

richard — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:21:01 +0000

This is a quick post for teeni, mac, et al, about the cooking blog. Let’s talk this through and see if we can agree on domain name, style and so on. I can provide the design and hosting. We can cover a wide degree of categories from normal cooking, through veggie cooking, styles like chinese, russian, mexican etc., and also the tools to cook with such as slow pots, pan-frying.

Same Food as When You Were Young

richard — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 19:16:59 +0000

Maybe not ‘young’ in this case since I’m talking about meatballs I made yesterday, but you know when you’re a kid and growing up, you have your favourite recipes? You know when you grow up and although many of us take precious little interest in cooking, we eventually come round to it, and long for those same recipes we had when we were young.

What I’m talking about is something I had when I was visiting the northeast of the US, a business trip and I had some meatballs in spaghetti sauce as this little restaurant, a mom-and-pop kind of place. They were amazing, and although the ones I cooked last night were great, still not the same.

My spaghetti bolognese recipe, nearly got that right. This despite the fact I even have the same recipe as my mum used, still doesn’t taste the same as I remember it. I have now ditched the wine, the cinzano (she used cinzano though, not wine), and added mushrooms and I’m so very close.

I think I’ll still be another year before I get it right, another ten or so times to cook it to the point of where it’s the same as my memory reminds me.