This week I spent a lot of time in the grocery store. I'll probably have to go back at least one more time, if only to buy a ham. My kitchen is full of beets, white cheddar, buttermilk, two kinds of butter, ginger ale, short ribs, leeks, potatoes, celery salt, bay leaves, sour cream, flour, sour cherries, sugar, peppercorns... Oh hell. I still need fresh green beans, ginger, pecans, and molasses. Oh, and the ham. A real ham, with a bone.
I'm making a Thanksgiving dinner this year. Mike's parents are visiting from South Carolina, so I sort of have to do this. It wasn't a plan. Not because I don't like to cook but mostly because I didn't think about it or prepare. I tend to cook on the fly, to just decide one day to do something and fill a grocery cart with a plethora of random items or to cobble together something from the pantry. Most often I like to bake, because I have a wicked sweet tooth and most everyone likes dessert.
When you watch the Food Network or Top Chef, the cooks on screen have lovely
mise en place, stacks of bowls and utensils. Everything is prepped and measured. Cooking is given some leniency, but baking is another story. Everyone talks about chemistry, reactions and applications of heat and cold. Things are delicately portioned, cupped, measured and sliced. The motto of baking is preparedness.
I am never prepared. If I remember to put the butter out to soften before I start itching to mix and bake I'm fortunate. Most of the time I don't preheat the oven. If I even take everything out of the cabinets before I start, I'm way ahead of myself. I realize this is antithetical to most of the high tenets of baking and prepared cooking. All those tiny bowls and exacting instructions often intimidate people right out of the kitchen. It doesn't have to be that way.
Most of my bad habits stem from a certain impatience and the rest from a careless, feckless attitude. If it comes out wrong, I just get to try again. That's okay with me. I am an incredible baker. My chocolate strawberry and my chocolate cherry pies are legendary. I've made key lime Pi Day pies, Elvis pound cake, homemade marshmallows, butterscotch chocolate brownies and
vampire cupcakes. I can do chocolate dipped hazelnut palmiers and chocolate peppermint sugar cookie rolls. Last year when Mike announced our engagement to his coworkers, he received a standing ovation based on a rum baba I sent to one Thursday meeting. A few weeks ago I made cookies shaped like the icon of the program he's working on for Demo Day. Today it was chocolate chip cookie bars.
Baking is about the smell, the feel, and the taste of the food. Once I've made something twice, I usually stop looking at a recipe. A few more times and then I start changing something every time. To be successful I need to know how the whisk feels when the cream is just coming to bubbles for a ganache, to recognize the smell of a crust just at golden brown or the sound of sugar in the bottom of the pan that isn't quite dissolved. Baking is experimental, experiential. If I have seen it, felt and tasted it, then I can probably recreate it. That act of creation is joyous and delicious.
So for Thanksgiving this year I'm going to make cheddar scallion drop biscuits, green beans sauteed with ginger, a ham with bourbon pecan glaze, Ukrainian style borscht and cherry pie. I have a few Russian and Eastern European cookbooks that I've combed for notes and ideas, plus a handful of borscht recipes. I'll bet you anything that come time I'll just start putting beets in the oven to roast and short ribs in the stock pot without measuring or preheating anything. It will be a little chaotic, and I'll make such a mess of the kitchen. I'll be woefully unprepared and will most likely have to send Mike to the store for something. In the end though, it will be delicious. That is all that matters.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}