The Urge to Cook

J. kind of called me out on something a few weeks back. I was baking a lot. And then wondering why I got fatter.

Now, I love to bake. It's a fantastic way to spend some time and end up with way too much sugary goodness than you could feasibly eat in a short timespan.

Over the summer, it were flourless peanut butter cookies. Then I tried cupcakes in September. When I came to brownies that were so dense and sticky, they wouldn't come from the pan, J. pulled the emergency brake and I didn't bake anymore.

Which doesn't take away that the dishwasher is an amazing tool in making cooking less of a hassle.

I like making things in the kitchen (except frying, I have an irrational fear of spraying cooking fat) and not baking sort of put a crimp on that.

We order out. One of my non-baking kitchen creations is a little binder with all take-out menus, which we can hang on the fridge. Ever since I bought the little paper thing, perforated it and stuck some pictures on there, we haven't had to look for the Chinese menu anymore. We'd gotten so used to having the menues scattered merrily across the apartment and disappearing when we tidied that Boyfriend actually went 'Have you seen the menu for the Itali--Wait, nevermind' the first time we ordered after I made it.

Which doesn't mean we don't cook.

There were bean burgers. They didn't taste like beans, but they had the structure of papier maché when you bit through their exterior baked shell. They were tasty, but I'm a horribly picky eater. It doesn't just have to taste good. It has to has the right structure, too. There's a reason I don't eat nutella straight from the jar, and it has nothing to do with nutella's tastiness.

Now, there's recipes I tried that tasted plain nasty. I checked to see if wholewheat flour porridge with raspberry coulis tasted nice. It very much did not. The hint of raspberry did not distract from the fact that I was shoveling paper-flavored paste into my mouth. With pips in there. 'Ew' didn't quite cover it.

But I discovered a few, non-sweet recipes that work. I also discovered spices and tomato paste.

There's the baked mushroom risotto that Boyfriend will eat and I think I already talked about. It tastes of mushrooms, but also of thyme. The combination is quite nice.

If I need garlic for something (and sometimes if I don't) I turn to dried garlic. The main reason for that is that I know myself. I'll buy fresh, use a few cloves and then find the bulb remainder all fuzzy and blue a few weeks later. Dried garlic is less risky. Also, less washing up to do.

There's my spaghetti sauce, which works quite easily since the recipe's instructions basically come down to 'fry, dump, stir, simmer'. A five-year-old with adequate common sense and a supervising adult could pull it off. Also, the recipe's customisable. We can make it a meat bonanza, with a token chopped up carrot, or we can admit we should be healthier and chuck in vegetables.

Speaking of which, I've looked in three major supermarkets so far for soup vegetables. Only two of them stocked any, and both only had one kind. I did not want brussels sprouts, so I ended up with a bio mix of 'chuck every available vegetable in there and freeze'. I used some in the spaghetti sauce. It was tasty, but the combination was downright weird.

And then there's soup. Soup, I've discovered, is even more foolproof than spaghetti sauce. Fry two onions per liter of stock, add veggies, add stock and spices (and tomato paste, hmmmm), let simmer until tender and blitz. If you can fry onions without burning them too horribly, you can make soup. I've let it simmer for half an hour, I've let it simmer for one hour. There is no discernable difference. The soup made from my soup vegetables is weird. First it was transparent and orange, then green, then yellowish... It's rainbow soup in natural tones. Looks weird, tastes great. I've made pea soup with bacon, throwing in the bacon before blenderising the whole. This was the first time I thought 'I've got a stick blender, I don't need to chop up the onions finely'. Strangely enough, the bacon had turned invisible after blending, but there's still that hint of dead pig that makes pea soup awesome.

I freeze what I can, too. It's saved us once or twice from I-don't-wanna-go-to-Mc-Do-but-we-don't-have-anything-in-the-house syndrome. What really annoyed me, though, was how inhumanly long it took to defrost on the stove. Soup, spaghetti sauce, creamed spinach... Turning the heat on high means burned things, turning it on a setting which defrosts is agonisingly slow. And then Boyfriend proposed we froze what we made ourselves in small chunks, in ice cube trays.

I was skeptical, but the internet said it was possible. So I sent Boyfriend to find some cheap ice cube trays, made some soup and froze it. Well, I waited for it to cool down. I doubt ice cube trays like hot fluids, to be honest, so I thought I wouldn't risk it. Also, we only had two trays for the experiment, and my smallest soup pot makes four trays and a plate of soup. It took the better part of the day to freeze it all, unmold it and put it in the freezer.

But it works. I made a bowl of soup by going to the freezer, filling my bowl with frozen soup cubes and nuking it for five minutes. Lo and behold, I had soup. The cubes are an awkward shape, so a full bowl of soup cubes only makes half a bowl of actual soup, but I can have soup without waiting for half an hour. Amazement.

Oh, and I'm making vanilla extract. The price of the stuff in Germany is, like most places I've visited in my life 'one firstborn child for three teaspoons'. Then one supermarket offered vanilla pods for ridiculously low prices, so I thought I'd make some sugar free extract rather than use vanilla sugar in my baking, on top of my actual sugar. It's a small step, but it's a step.

So I got eighteen vanilla pods, scraped them out, and put the seeds and husks in a bottle of vodka. Then I wallpapered the bottle in stickers with happy, cheerful messages like 'drink this and die', 'poison', 'danger' and a skull and crossbones. Oh, and one that says 'shake me'. If I shake it daily, and I worked cleanly enough, I'll have about 7 deciliters of pure vanilla extract by early December. For under fifteen euros, mind you.

When last weekend turned around, I wanted to bake again. Or cook. Or justify eating junk food without wondering how much trans fat had been pumped into my meal. We had tomato paste. We had a few pizza toppings. I theorized there must be recipes for pizza dough without yeast and rising times. Then I sent a passive agressive text to Boyfriend. Something along the lines of 'If only we had cheese and salami, then we could have fresh pizza tonight'. It worked.

The internet provided me with a pretty straightforward recipe for baking powder pizza dough. A bit of searching later, I'd tweaked it a bit to not include oil and instead have herbs baked into the crust. Basil pizza base is delicious, by the way. 600 mils of flour, a teaspoon of salt, a packet of baking powder (15 gr), however much dried herbs tickle your fancy, 200 mils of water. Make base (or little bread balls) and bake for 15-25 minutes at 200°C, depending on toppings, thickness and ovens. My ham-and-salami creation was done quicker than Boyfriend's salami-and-fresh-bacon extravaganza. I didn't have to worry about salmonella as much, and the oven I used was still hot from Boyfriend's pizza.

I rolled out the dough between two sheets of baking paper with my bottle of what at the moment is heavily vanilla infused liquor. Surprisingly effective. Who needs rolling pins, anyway?

Oh, and since it takes less than five minutes to make the dough, we checked if we could make little pizza dough bread balls from the stuff. We could. They're amazing.