Week 3!

 

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. This is definitely a big part of what I learned this week as well, that just being able to cook more is better than strictly following a plan or theme I had preset for the week. Although Italian food does have a big range, I sometimes found myself not sure of what to make for lunch or something like that, and just decided to make something that sounded good rather than following the theme. 

Salad!

My top three things that I cooked this week, though, were probably mint-tomato pasta, salad, and the Gazpacho. The gazpacho was really good, but a funny story that I had with the recipe was that I actually blended it for too long. Usually a gazpacho turns pink or red when the oil is added in, but I blended the vegetables before adding the oil for a bit too long. This caused the gazpacho to turn orange, which was an interesting change. I really thought it would impact the flavor, and was a bit concerned about that, but after tasting it it seemed to be not any different than any other gazpacho I have had. I was almost ready to give up on it, but It worked out, and the color change was barely noticed. With the pasta, I got stuck a bit on following the recipe, as it asked for three cups of fresh mint, which I thought sounded a little excessive. I followed it anyway though, and it ended up making the dish much better than I would've thought. This may have convinced me a bit more to sometimes follow a set plan, because there are a lot of people who know a lot more than me about cooking.

Grilling a Pizza

1: Improve my tangible cooking skills- 

This is something that has definitely stepped up this week. I cooked more, so it means that I was using cooking skills more often. This was also a week with a bit more basic cooking skills implemented in simpler recipes, which almost helps me a lot more than more technical recipes.

2: Focus on the process of creating a meal (Shopping, prep, cleaning, community)-

I also found that this was much easier to work on after changing up my project with a less strict focus on the theme of the week. Making simpler foods, also, makes the whole process a lot easier. 

3: Explore the foods of each region thoroughly and respectfully-

I focused a bit more on just cooking this week rather than doing research, but this was still one of the more fun parts of my project. Especially with Italy and not focusing on one chef, I was able to look at a much wider range of foods this week, which was really interesting.

Questions and response to comments:

Thanks for all the helpful resources in the comments, and they all look really great!

-Does it make sense to mostly focus on simpler foods?