ayonecan-cook

You could say I started the new year off with a big slump. Not in a bad way. Just a lazy way. Too many New Years too fast makes me wonder whether I'm coming or going. New Years  seem to be standing around every corner and jumping out at you these days. And before you've had time to be done with the old one you find yourself standing and talking to a new one. And wonder where the old one went. Nevertheless, I made some of Jamie's pizza dough yesterday, rolled them out in discs, half baked them and stacked them in the freezer in plastic bags so that FMs could make their own pizzas when they're hungry. But this morning I made a sweet pizza. A quick apple pie pizza. Apple slices cooked in a skillet with a knob of butter and some brown sugar, topped the pizza discs with them and gave them a quick basking in the oven.  In what has seemed a long time I had a quick, guilt free, crusty apple pie for breakfast. It wasn't bad at all. The recipe ~ Pizza crust reci...

Happy New Year to all my lovely visitors, to my dear friends and to my wonderful blog friends. I know. I've been slacking. But I've been up to something too. Here.    HAPPY NEW YEAR! OF BLOGGING..... AND THEN SOME!  The beautiful flowers are from The Graphics Fairy. Do visit her lovely blog for more.

A biryani requires saffron. A spice I hardly use but had the pleasure of using when I made this.  In using saffron i realized that crushing the saffron threads to a powder before soaking them in some hot water is a must if you want the intense crimson liquid to bloom to its fullest and to speckle the rice as if it had caught bits and pieces of golden sunlight here and there making the biryani rice quite attractive.  The second time I made biryani I had not crushed the saffron to a powder and all I got was a yellow hue that made the biryani rice look as if i had cooked the rice in tumeric tinted water. Which is ok if I was making tumeric rice of course....but not if it was a biryani.  Ghee or clarified butter adds so much flavour as well giving it the distinctive biryani taste. This too I had discovered when I had omitted using ghee the second time around. Now I know why rules are meant to be broken. It convinces you that they shouldn't be. Unlike the true India...

                                                                 Mom, dad, my brother and I at age 10 I pretty much grew up with little memory of comfort food. As a child I don't remember food being used as a means to appease, to cajole or to numb. But if I close my eyes and think hard enough, the nearest thing to comfort food would probably be a thick, dark and sweet soy sauce . The Indonesian kind. And that was not even a dish. It was a condiment.  Nevertheless that is what brings me back to my childhood, the foodie way. Mom mixed it into white rice with filleted fried fish. I savoured every grain of rice and the pieces of fish that clung to it.  That and Wood'...

I am not a foodie in the holiest sense of the word. I never knew foodie, the word, or the people, were nouns or a religion until I started this blog. When I meet friends I would rather talk about life, it's joys, it's pains, dissect it, chew it, get hysterical and finally try to digest it without getting constipated.  But one day when I was bored enough I looked it up. And this is how a foodie is described on slashfood.com ..... A foodie is someone who has an ardent and refined interest in food.....to be a foodie is not only to like food, but to be interested in it... ..... ......Generally, you have to know what you like, why you like it, recognize why some foods are better than others....... It's those first thirteen and last eight words that disturb me. Refined? Nor do I know why some food tastes better than others. All I know is that  it tastes darn gooder .  Apart from the fact that What The Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell is a wonderful book about creeping into th...

I really did not want to let go. My life would be empty, meaningless and totally without aim. I came home, alone, an empty bag in hand and a feeling of listlessness accompanied me as I went about my tasks today. Cooking, baking and eating just wouldn't be the same anymore. My heart desires, my head has the plans but now the body does not cooperate. I stared out the Hyundai at passing cars and dumb buildings and wondered how long it would take before I were whole again, before I feel complete so that life could get clicking again. So that it goes back to it's delightful disarray and funny frustrations. A week they say before they'd call and tell me what went wrong. A week? That's eternity. And then perhaps another week to make it right. Oh god. That's unthinkable. Unacceptable. Un...un...undesirable. Oh s hoot . What a strange thing. I had bought some yellow chrysanthemums today. I had thought it would brighten things up even more. You know...sunshine yellow....funny...

  Ahhhh so that's how they do it. They pipe the fluffy mixture through long tubes and cut its tubular shape into equal pieces. I have always wondered how they do it.  And now I need to brush my teeth. And gargle my throat out. With salted water. That was exceedingly sweet. Not the marshmallow itself but from the tons of icing sugar I used to coat it with. To prevent it from sticking to everything it came into contact with ~ fingers, knife, mini paper cases, table, tongue, throat and teeth. These, my friends, are not to be made in some crazy hot, humid, tropical peninsula that starts with the letter M, that sits right smack on the equator. If anyone around here has been wholly successful in making marshmallows... that had set perfectly,  that did not shimmer with wetness as it set,  that did not require a crazy coating of icing sugar,  that did not cling and stretch as you pulled your fingers away from it,  that you could 'lift' out,   I would like...