Theo Tannahill's Senior Project

  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, ...

  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...