I need a better "food" icon.
A Partial List Of Things I Want To Cook[Bake/Roast/Fry/Boil/Grill/Brew]
- My father's homemade crackers. These are made from a modified family recipe for pie crust, and depending on how long and how hot they're baked, come out as either a lightly chewy flatbread or a flaky cracker.
- My aunt's vanilla poundcake. Additionally, the family's chocolate sauce, which is ridiculously rich.
- Whole wheat pasta with pesto, cherry tomatoes, and asparagus slivers. I love pasta, and desperately want to experiment more with whole wheat pasta, which has this deliciously grainy texture and nutty taste. Also, I still haven't tried multi-colored whole wheat pasta.
- Grilled tofu with ginger-, lemon-, and wine-focused marinades. I have insufficient experience marinading and grilling, and clearly must learn.
- Cream scones, almond scones, blackberry scones, every damn scone recipe I can find that sounds good. Mm, scones.
- I would love to try to make lemon curd.
- Roasted root vegetables with rosemary. Red potatoes, fingerlings, yukon gold potatoes, yams, carrots...
- Salmon seared with a pepper crust. This recipe, maybe?
- Salmon seared with a maple syrup glaze. scazon and I had this in Canada, and it was delicious. I will find a recipe.
- My parents used to make very basic, rather bland fried fish fillets on occasion. I want to make fried fish fillets with fresh herbs and bizarre spices in the batter.
- Olive oil cake. Mmm, olive oil.
- Olive bread. I haven't yet found a recipe that seems best.
- French bread. Last summer, this went fairly well, but the bread didn't quite rise enough due to a stupid mistake on my part. This summer, a rematch.
- Pancakes from scratch. Also, cornmeal pancakes. Also, vanilla-cinnamon pancakes. Also, black-and-blue (blackberry and blueberry) pancakes.
- These crazy chocolate-mint cupcakes. Also, pretty much everything on this blog.
- Soup soup soup soup. (Potato/pear/celery soup? That delicious corn soup which set the blender in my parents' kitchen on fire? Black bean and squash soup? Summer vegetable soup?) Soup soup soup!
- I'd love to learn to cook mussels. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone else who likes eating gastropods.
- Salad experimentation. Pears and goat cheese with spinach and arugula? Herb salad? Also, I need to learn how to make more salad dressings.
- Fried rice. Both the pancakes of fried leftover rice that make a delicious snack, and actual fried rice with vegetables and tofu or shrimp.
- Vegetable potstickers. Surprisingly easy to make.
- I need to learn how to actually make a curry-style dish the way they're meant to be made, instead of just relying on coconut milk to save me.
- I will make tri-colored rotini whenever I need a quick snack. Well, that or a fried egg sandwich. Mm, comfort food.
- I'll finally have a chance to experiment (with ezmo11, I hope, as she already has some experience with this) with mixing my own tea. Lavender black tea? Mint-thyme white tea? There will be iced-tea parties!
Some of these are things I've made before, but many are experiments I want to try or recipes that have always sounded good but which I've never gotten a chance to make. I only really started experimenting with food in earnest last summer-- my parents aren't bad cooks (they certainly never served any of the quintessentially bad middle-American foods like meatloaf or casseroles), but everything they cook is very bland. Last summer was my first chance to really cook without someone looking over my shoulder and going, "That's too much spice!" or "That'll never work!" Admittedly, sometimes it didn't work, but still. I lack some surprisingly basic cooking skills-- I have no idea how to make a white sauce, and only know how to make oil-and-vinegar dressing through experimentation-- that I need to learn.
I can't believe I've managed to survive an entire academic year without regular kitchen access. This summer is going to be full of epic experiments and really learning to cook.
On that note, I need to go get lunch from #$^@% Commons.