Kitties Love Yarn

Daughter, recently, has decided that she really enjoys cooking. Last Friday, she made a pot of soup pretty much by herself (I provided supervision, coaching, and a wee bit of carrot-chopping), and she's helped out with a few other dinners. She can follow a simple recipe accurately, if slowly, and is developing knife skills.

From my perspective, this is a double-edged sword. I enjoy not having to be fully responsible for dinner most nights, and cooking - at a bare minimum, accurate recipe-following - is a skill I'd like her to have mastered when I send her off into the world. On the other hand...did I mention slowly? Part of the problem is an issue of brute strength (or maybe aggression or confidence) - if I tell her to stir something, the top layer of the container might get shifted around a bit, but the bottom stuff won't be touched unless I encourage her to really get in there and dig. But this is frustrating for me because she won't let me help. Or even demonstrate much. Or even, in some cases, provide advice.

This is probably something I need to just relax and be patient about - provide coaching where she needs it and will accept it, appreciate the help if she's offering it, and accept that some days dinner will be kind of late.

Oh, new favorite quick-and-easy dinner:
Cauliflower & Sausage Bake
2 1-lb packages of frozen cauliflower florets
1 "loop" of smoked sausage, sliced 1/4" thick.
1 8-oz package cream cheese, softened
1 8-oz package shredded cheddar

In a big glass casserole dish, nuke the cauliflower to death - you want it extra-soft, even overcooked. Mash/break up the florets into smaller chunks. Stir in the sausage (no real need to pre-cook if you got a "fully cooked" variety, unless you know your sausage is extra-greasy when heated), then the cream cheese and cheddar. Sprinkle paprika over the top if you're so inclined. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes or so.

I dunno, but I'm blogging about it anyways. :)

I started following Jennifer L. Aikman-Smith's (yes, the Dragon Dreams cross stitch designer) blog Inhaling Creativity, in which she is exploring and stimulating her creative process and recording the results, with exercises for those of us following along at home. A few of the "homework assignments" have involved playing with your food a bit, going out of your culinary comfort zone.

One weekend, it was suggested that you work with food that stimulated the senses - she mentioned going through your spice rack and smelling things...and the best-smelling things in my spice rack, all taken together, suggested an Indian dish. I stumbled upon Nigella Lawson's recipe for Mughlai Chicken, a dish from central India that aimed more for complexity of flavor than heat (actually there's no heat at all...), and while I'm normally a little skeptical of Indian food as presented by a Brit, the reviewers raved about it, including one person who claimed Indian descent, so I went for it. The recipe was time-consuming but easy, and came out absolutely delicious - Nigella says it's one of those dishes that tastes better the next day, but there weren't any leftovers. (The one complaint: Daughter didn't like the raisins. I ate them for her. :) )

For another cooking "assignment" - she'd mentioned a few dishes she'd cooked from Jamie Oliver's cookbooks, and I remembered a dish from his Food Network show that amounted to "peppers stuffed with peppers with more peppers on the side". Hubby had started drooling over that, but the recipe wasn't on Food Network's website, so I got the "Jamie At Home" cookbook from the library. I didn't end up making the stuffed peppers (yet!), but I did find a recipe that seems to hit all four of Hubby's food groups: Steak, Guinness, and Cheese in Puff Pastry. How can you go wrong with a meal that combines meat, beer, cheese, and pie? I managed, kind of: since the stew is braised in the oven (or a slow-cooker would probably do it, but I would use less water), it has to cook an awfully long time, so I had to cook the stew one day and make the pie the next. The other issue I had was the puff pastry - I probably didn't let it thaw enough, so I had some trouble rolling it out, and the top sheet only just barely fit onto the pie. It wasn't the prettiest pie ever - but at some point it stops mattering what it looks like. :)

...and then on an entirely unrelated note, I cooked to help Daughter with real homework: part of her Social Studies grade is based on outside activities in which you learn something about another culture. I guided her through the process of making onigiri, Japanese rice balls wrapped in nori. For our first try, they didn't come out too bad - if we do it again, I think our hands will need to be a little wetter while we mold the rice. After that, I raided Personal Trainer Cooking for a Japanese dish to serve with them for dinner, and came up with a yummy gingered pork chop - and I was struck by the principle behind the recipe. The dish was actually very simple - I don't think there's much simpler than a marinated, grilled chop, unless it's a grilled chop that you didn't bother to marinate - but the presentation, specified by the instructions given, was unique and interesting. Isn't that the basic gist of all Japanese cooking? If I'm going to be exploring the creative potential in cooking, that probably wouldn't be a bad place to start.