Seeing as how the creators of MPP have been kind enough to make a forum section on cooking at my request, please allow me to be the first to make a post here.
I debated for a moment about what recipe or goodie to post here, but then thought there might be a better way to start things off. Rather than just some run of the mill culinary delight, I thought maybe some background on why I thought such a forum might be worthwhile here. The most obvious answer right off the top is both my wife and I love to cook (gee, go figure, right?), but there's more to it than just that, and some of those reasons actually pertain to this overall forum, Mud Pit Politics, oddly enough.
Interestingly, cooking is very cathartic in many ways. Despite all of the madness going on in the outside world, cooking affords an opportunity to create a very satisfying inner microcosm with endless opportunities for creativity. In simpler words, cooking allows you to create great eats which you get to enjoy without having to even set foot outside your door. Further, some of the best creations happen not from a bunch of expensive, hard to find, ingredients bought at specialty markets, but rather things created from simple basic ingredients and traditional, often forgotten, methods.
My wife has a culinary degree from a highly respected east coast culinary institute and I grew up in a family of great cooks and love to cook myself (I am an engineer by profession). As many know, we also run a beef cattle ranch, which means we live out in the boondocks of America far from the city life. Soooo...back in 2017 we embarked on creating what amounts to a commercial kitchen inside of our home. For those familiar with home remodeling you will know there are two places in the home which top the list in terms of difficulty to remodel. In 2nd place is a bathroom, and in 1st place by a country mile is a kitchen, and ours was no exception! The overall project took about two years to complete and was done in three distinct phases. Being a contractor in a former life myself, we self-performed all of the work from start to finish. The only exceptions where we contracted out anything was some specialty granite work and some incidental HVAC work I was just too lazy to do in the attic. Otherwise, all the carpentry, cabinet work, plumbing, electrical, mechanical and finishes were done my my wife and I. The end product turned out to be the kitchen of our dreams, and it is the place where we create some of the masterpieces that we do.
So, what kinds of things do we cook as a general rule? One of my wife's specialties is baking. I'll get to mine in a moment, but I want to spend a moment with baking first. Baking sounds so boring; stick it in the oven, wait 30 minutes and it's done, right? I don't think anything could be further from the truth. Over time I have learned that baking is possibly the single most difficult cooking skill to master. And, even after years of attempts, I would rank myself as a 1, maybe a 1.5, on a scale of 1 to 10 at baking (and I'm a pretty damn good cook, if I do say so myself). The wife on the other hand ranks about a 9.8 on the same scale, which I guess makes sense given this was her specialization in culinary school. Baking is as much science as any engineering or chemistry course, with an extra heavy dose of artistic flair thrown in.
I'm the traditionalist. I like to learn the old ways of doing things, so I'm into things like charcuterie (preserving meats), curing, smoking, cheese making. etc. If there's an old-school method I want to learn it and learn it well. Of course grilling and stove work also factor in heavily here too.
As this is post is growing too long, I'll wrap things up with this final thought. At the beginning I referred to the catharsis of cooking. When 2020 rolled around and the entire World shut down with the great plan-demic, just imagine how rewarding it was to be able to create a sense of 'norma'l along with some really good eats when the entire world outside the door had gone mad. Cathartic.
Bon Apetit'!!
I debated for a moment about what recipe or goodie to post here, but then thought there might be a better way to start things off. Rather than just some run of the mill culinary delight, I thought maybe some background on why I thought such a forum might be worthwhile here. The most obvious answer right off the top is both my wife and I love to cook (gee, go figure, right?), but there's more to it than just that, and some of those reasons actually pertain to this overall forum, Mud Pit Politics, oddly enough.
Interestingly, cooking is very cathartic in many ways. Despite all of the madness going on in the outside world, cooking affords an opportunity to create a very satisfying inner microcosm with endless opportunities for creativity. In simpler words, cooking allows you to create great eats which you get to enjoy without having to even set foot outside your door. Further, some of the best creations happen not from a bunch of expensive, hard to find, ingredients bought at specialty markets, but rather things created from simple basic ingredients and traditional, often forgotten, methods.
My wife has a culinary degree from a highly respected east coast culinary institute and I grew up in a family of great cooks and love to cook myself (I am an engineer by profession). As many know, we also run a beef cattle ranch, which means we live out in the boondocks of America far from the city life. Soooo...back in 2017 we embarked on creating what amounts to a commercial kitchen inside of our home. For those familiar with home remodeling you will know there are two places in the home which top the list in terms of difficulty to remodel. In 2nd place is a bathroom, and in 1st place by a country mile is a kitchen, and ours was no exception! The overall project took about two years to complete and was done in three distinct phases. Being a contractor in a former life myself, we self-performed all of the work from start to finish. The only exceptions where we contracted out anything was some specialty granite work and some incidental HVAC work I was just too lazy to do in the attic. Otherwise, all the carpentry, cabinet work, plumbing, electrical, mechanical and finishes were done my my wife and I. The end product turned out to be the kitchen of our dreams, and it is the place where we create some of the masterpieces that we do.
So, what kinds of things do we cook as a general rule? One of my wife's specialties is baking. I'll get to mine in a moment, but I want to spend a moment with baking first. Baking sounds so boring; stick it in the oven, wait 30 minutes and it's done, right? I don't think anything could be further from the truth. Over time I have learned that baking is possibly the single most difficult cooking skill to master. And, even after years of attempts, I would rank myself as a 1, maybe a 1.5, on a scale of 1 to 10 at baking (and I'm a pretty damn good cook, if I do say so myself). The wife on the other hand ranks about a 9.8 on the same scale, which I guess makes sense given this was her specialization in culinary school. Baking is as much science as any engineering or chemistry course, with an extra heavy dose of artistic flair thrown in.
I'm the traditionalist. I like to learn the old ways of doing things, so I'm into things like charcuterie (preserving meats), curing, smoking, cheese making. etc. If there's an old-school method I want to learn it and learn it well. Of course grilling and stove work also factor in heavily here too.
As this is post is growing too long, I'll wrap things up with this final thought. At the beginning I referred to the catharsis of cooking. When 2020 rolled around and the entire World shut down with the great plan-demic, just imagine how rewarding it was to be able to create a sense of 'norma'l along with some really good eats when the entire world outside the door had gone mad. Cathartic.
Bon Apetit'!!
