Baking!

[Essyne]

I Baked Today! (*beams with pride*)

I think it turned out okay ((the dogs liked it at least!  )).

So, really - I can't cook OR bake - AT ALL. I guess my mother's Italian "can cook fantastic, zillion course meals w/o blinking an eye or looking at a recipe/measuring cup" gene skipped a generation ( I do make a mean bowl of cereal, though  ).

Can you cook? Success/horror stories?? Our phone lines are open. . .

~Ess~

[Bob]

I can boil toast 'n stuff.

(Another intelligent thing that came out of Bob's mouth recently while making introductions, in response to, "Can you cook?"  What he meant to say was, "I can boil noodles and make toast.")

[pianochick93]

I can cook decently with a recipe. I can also cook toast and rice and pasta without one.

I make a mean spaghetti bolognaise, though it's my mum's recipe, and she makes it better than me.

One time I was making a cheesecake for my mum for her birthday, and it had a jelly layer on top. Of course I read the instruction wrong and put 1 1/2 cups of water in instead of 1/2 a cup.
Mum managed to do something to it to get most of it gone, but it didn't work very well.

To top it all off I was stupid enough to place little paper umbrellas next to the candles, and they caught fire

I was about 9 I think.

[Essyne]

hehe - so I left the banana/blueberry bread that I baked (which, surprisingly, was quite good, if I don't say so myself) to cool, and I walked back in and my cats were DEVOURING it.  .  .  .  .

Evidently, they're not all over their organic, raw-food diet. 
Fat cats will never get thin, I suppose. 

[elspeth]

I can cook and bake (she says, without a hint of smugness, honest!). I learned from my mother and grandmother, and now recipe books are sources of ideas, not just lists of instructions.

I think it really helps to be taught by somebody, not learn from a book... I learned to do the 'add as much as it needs and cook it till it's done' way which makes life so much easier, especially when you're catering for a different number of people than it says in the book! Lots of practice is good, too, doing a recipe once and having it turn out bad should be a challenge. My recipe books are covered in notes like 'it works better if you do this' or 'replace this with that for a better flavour' or 'cook it for an hour, not forty minutes, the author clearly had a better oven than me'.

Some of my best dishes... rissotto, especially with salmon. Blackberry jam. Chicken pie. Mushroom soup. Fruit cake. Gooseberry fool. And I do very good pancakes, the secret is to beat the egg into the milk first then add flour and milk until you get the consistency right, and make sure the pan's hot to start with. Oh, and I do roast lamb with all the trimmings to die for - I knew that had turned out well when my mother was impressed! Although gravy is still a work in progress, I'm still trying to figure out why mum's gravy thickens and mine doesn't when we use the same recipe...

[s_bussotti]

I Baked Today! (*beams with pride*)

I think it turned out okay ((the dogs liked it at least!  )).

So, really - I can't cook OR bake - AT ALL. I guess my mother's Italian "can cook fantastic, zillion course meals w/o blinking an eye or looking at a recipe/measuring cup" gene skipped a generation ( I do make a mean bowl of cereal, though  ).

Can you cook? Success/horror stories?? Our phone lines are open. . .

~Ess~

Susan?

[Kassaa]

Susan?

Age:     17

nah, and Susan has to be able to cook, otherwise she would be a bad mother 'n stuff.

[Bob]

nah, and Susan has to be able to cook, otherwise she would be a bad mother 'n stuff.

(raises eyebrows)  Oooo...  I think you just said a lot there.

[slobone]

I'm pretty good at soups & stews, pasta, basic meat & veggies, some desserts. Unfortunately I've never learned as much about pastry as I'd like. And I'm always making new discoveries about basic stuff, like how to make an omelet...