Last Week!

 

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, and had most of what I needed at my house. I also found recipes from all over rather than just a few cookbooks, with the New York Times cooking website being a great resource for that.

Along with having more recipes, I also felt like I just did really well on the food I baked this week, much more so than previous weeks. I felt like I made progress on all of my goals, and came out of the week with even more things that I want to make in the future. I also mixed in a lot of just cooking lunch or breakfast this week, and having baking being separate from that almost made me cook more in general, as I wasn't spending the whole day prepping dinner.

Overall, my tangible goals for the whole month were to 1: Improve my tangible cooking skills, 2: Focus on the process of creating a meal (Shopping, prep, cleaning, community), and 3: Explore the foods of each region thoroughly and respectfully. I would say I mostly hit all three goals, but possibly some more than others. I think I really worked on tangible cooking skills, and I can say that I feel more confident cooking now than I did before my project, and I did a good job learning about food before I cooked in and looking at cultural backgrounds. I wish I had planned a bit better though, as I could have done more big dinners and meals if I had organized and thought ahead of time a bit more. Time just went by really fast, and before I knew it I was already in the second, third, fourth week and didn't feel like there was enough time to plan a whole meal with a bunch of people. I still got to cook for a bunch of people though, and I felt probably the best when I was doing that. Cooking for other people was for sure the highlight of my project, and it made the prep and cleaning, which I thought were more of project lowlights, really worth it.

I would recommend this project really to anyone just looking for a big overview of cooking, and a more fast-paced, switching between topics and themes type of project. I would definitely make some changes if I were to do this project again, mostly adding more structure and self-accountability for planning. I would also use the weekend to figure out all of the plans for the week, as I usually got caught up in figuring everything out on Monday and felt a bit overwhelmed. Flexibility was a big help to my project though, and feeling like as long as I'm cooking something I enjoy I am working on the project was very comforting. I wish I had realized that earlier, but for the second two weeks of my project It really helped me figure out where to take my project. Overall, though, I had a great month of cooking, and I felt like I really improved in pretty much all of my goals. I know what things I like to cook now, and am easily going to continue cooking more frequently during the summer.