My new hobby
For any of you who have seen Stranger Than Fiction, I feel quite a bit like Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal's character). For those who haven't seen the movie, Pascal owns and runs a bakery. She originally went to law school, but ended up dropping out and becoming a baker instead. She said that whenever they were having study nights (which I'm sure are frequent in law school), she would make cookies and snacks. Everybody loved the food she made, so she started looking up more recipes and kept making food, and more people came to the study nights and more people loved her food and she kept on putting more effort into it . . . until she dropped out of law school because she was nearly failing. Now, I didn't drop out because I was nearly failing, but I did go to graduate school and find a unexpected interest in cooking, and more specifically making cookies.
This is how it goes, as part of the McNeese MFA program, we would frequently have visiting writers come in to read their work. Whenever they did, we would have a party for them, and all the grad students were supposed to bring food. For the first one I brought some cookies and everyone kept telling me how great they were. So the next time, I looked up a recipe for snickerdoodles and made them. Again, everyone said they were great, and W.D. Snodgrass took some of them with him.
So I started finding more recipes, and bought a cookie recipe book. (By the way, when people know you like to bake, you can pretty rapidly stop buying yourself cookbooks, because other people will buy them for you until you have more than you could possibly use.) I developed the odd problem that I simply loved to make cookies, the process, not merely the end product, and I would make cookies and then I would need to find people to eat them.
So now I'm finished with my MA, and I'm still baking. My most recent project was angel food cake. I was telling my sister about wanting to make that, and she said there were great mixes out there that aren't a lot of work. I didn't know how to adequately explain to her that I didn't want a cake; I wanted to make a cake. (I did, by the way, complete an angel food cake from scratch; it turned out great.)
A few of the interesting recipes I've tried so far, in no particular order: shoofly pie, triple berry pudding cake, citrus creme cookies, chocolate mint cookies, lemon meringue pie (which I tried twice: the first time it tasted great but didn't gel, the second time the consistency was fine, but it didn't taste nearly as good (although everyone else thought it was good)), spicy pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, lemon surprise pudding . . . I could go on.
I'm thinking about posting some of these recipes and describing the end product, if you're interested, definitely let me know. I don't intend to turn this into a cooking blog, but it might be fun to write about sometimes.
This is how it goes, as part of the McNeese MFA program, we would frequently have visiting writers come in to read their work. Whenever they did, we would have a party for them, and all the grad students were supposed to bring food. For the first one I brought some cookies and everyone kept telling me how great they were. So the next time, I looked up a recipe for snickerdoodles and made them. Again, everyone said they were great, and W.D. Snodgrass took some of them with him.
So I started finding more recipes, and bought a cookie recipe book. (By the way, when people know you like to bake, you can pretty rapidly stop buying yourself cookbooks, because other people will buy them for you until you have more than you could possibly use.) I developed the odd problem that I simply loved to make cookies, the process, not merely the end product, and I would make cookies and then I would need to find people to eat them.
So now I'm finished with my MA, and I'm still baking. My most recent project was angel food cake. I was telling my sister about wanting to make that, and she said there were great mixes out there that aren't a lot of work. I didn't know how to adequately explain to her that I didn't want a cake; I wanted to make a cake. (I did, by the way, complete an angel food cake from scratch; it turned out great.)
A few of the interesting recipes I've tried so far, in no particular order: shoofly pie, triple berry pudding cake, citrus creme cookies, chocolate mint cookies, lemon meringue pie (which I tried twice: the first time it tasted great but didn't gel, the second time the consistency was fine, but it didn't taste nearly as good (although everyone else thought it was good)), spicy pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, lemon surprise pudding . . . I could go on.
I'm thinking about posting some of these recipes and describing the end product, if you're interested, definitely let me know. I don't intend to turn this into a cooking blog, but it might be fun to write about sometimes.