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Last Week!

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  The theme for my cooking this week was baking, which opened up much more for me to do than my other weeks, but also changed up how I did my project a bit. Overall, I had a really successful week of baking, and I managed to escape without any huge failures. Most of the things I made were pretty good, which could have come from simpler recipes or possibly just me having more experience baking. The main struggle I faced early on was running out of ingredients. I started to make something, then realized that I had run out of something small like baking powder, and would have to run and go get some while leaving half of a recipe at home. This happened a few times surprisingly, with ingredients that I just assumed I had. It was mostly more of a problem with baking because ingredients and measurements need to be much more exact than most types of cooking. On the flipside though, one of the good things about the baking theme this week was that I had to go get less specialty ingredients, ...
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Week 3!

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  This week I focused on Italian food, and for the first week I didn't focus specifically on one chef or cookbook, and more on just what I wanted to cook under the umbrella of Italian food. This honestly really freed up what I was able to do, and although I didn't have that one place to center my cooking from, I found it much better than the other way that I’ve been doing my project so far. With this change, I could also make many more recipes, and make things out of what I had lying around. I even strayed from my Italian theme to make a Gazpacho on a really hot day, but I think setting up my project to allow me to more do what I want has been a great change as of late. Very good pasta! Even though it doesn’t exactly follow the project, I think my being more comfortable with going off topic to make different dishes is more helpful for general life skills, and will set me up better to just be able to cook without a fully formed plan, which I feel like happens very frequently. Th...
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Week 2!

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  This week, the theme for my cooking was from two books by David Chang, a famous Korean-American chef who founded Momofuku restaurant in New York. I tried to use mostly recipes from his two books, as well as look at other things we had made such as a few different tv shows.  Much as with last week, the focus was on culture and chef as well as the food itself. This was especially interesting, as Chang is much more socially outspoken than last week’s chef, Francis Mallman, as well as being a larger force in the American culinary scene. His show Ugly Delicious was especially interesting, and brought up interesting commentary about the social currents attached to many foods in the US, and the cultural meaning of certain dishes, some of which have massive amounts of importance in American culture. He also has some amazing recipes, all of which were much easier to understand and make than the ones from last week. This week was mostly successful, and I think a good amount of it was ...
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Week 1

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My main goals for this project are to  1: Improve my tangible cooking skills 2: Focus on the process of creating a meal (Shopping, prep, cleaning, community) 3: Explore the foods of each region thoroughly and respectfully For my project, I am cooking foods from four different regions of the world, one each week. I am going to be improving my cooking ability, as well as finding dishes that I really enjoy cooking. It will also be really interesting to switch regions every week, giving me a bunch of time to do research and learn about each culture and region that I am cooking foods from. A big part of my project is also personal responsibility, as I will be shopping, preparing, and cleaning each time I cook. I want to be able to get into a nice rhythm with my cooking, and really feel as if I have accomplished something with tangible cooking skills. I’ve always been interested in cooking, and helped my family with big meals as well as cooked myself, but this will give me a ton of time ...
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