Idlewild

Just to add an idea to the pile, I made a pineapple upside down cake last year that I went a bit nuts with the fruits in. I wanted to substitute apple sauce for butter because I need to lose weight and it's a common substitution - but I wanted to add extra richness so I think I ended up using a whole lot of puree'd pears and peaches and it was deliciously moist and you really couldn't note a lack of butter (I did use butter for the topping, it'd be sacrilege not to). I think something with pureed fruits and perhaps some almond flour in with whatever non-wheat flour you use might be delicious. I'm not sure how stable it'd be for making a large cake though . My cake outcome was very sticky and moist, and that was using wheat flour so I'm not sure what the crumb would be like without the support of wheat flour. I'm a big fan of the texture almond meal gives, but it's better suited to flattish cakes, alas. All the wheat-free cakes that I've had have been less than spectacularly risen and I think you can do beautifully rich things if you work with the nature of the substitutions rather than trying to make them do things they aren't meant to - but that may not be so helpful for creating a wedding cake. Another cake mum and I made a couple of times was a very rich fruit cake that got most of its body from crystalized exotic fruits and big chunks of nut and good dark chocolate, the batter around them was almost incidental. That might be good for a layer - you should be able to make a good enough batter to hold it together with various substitutions for flour and shortening.

Bleh. I grew up with electric kettles in Australia. Useful, sure. But I dislike them. They have no place in the rhythms of my kitchen. We have a perfectly lovely enamelled stovetop kettle that boils in plenty of time with a nice hearty whistle. Electric kettles just don't do it for me on an emotional satisfaction level!

What an enjoyable blog. I loved the picture of halva. It's been literally years since I had halva but I can still remember the taste. Incredible stuff. The fig jam sounds really good too and I may have to seek out figs at some point in the near future. The panino with fig jam, prosciutto and cheese sounded most excellent and mouthwatering.

I grew up cooking, in a family where eating out was a special occasion - fast food was pizza once in a blue moon, from a real Italian pizzeria where the proprietor grew his own peppers and tomatoes. I moved away to college, was broke and unclear on the concept of cooking for only one person so I ate terribly. But life was still good. I moved to the states to be with my husband, and fell into the habit of eating out a lot more often. Life was still good, but I was not looking as svelte as perhaps once I was. But both of us were working, and it was all too easy to stop off at the local tex-mex joint for drinkies and dinner after work, rather than getting home and facing prep and cooking. Well, the stress of working full time in a corporate environment really wasn't working out for my husband. He hated it. I hated how depressed and angry he was about it. We both hated how much we ate crap because we were all out of energy for cooking. We're both food people and we'd pretty much had enough. He quit his job and started working part time, from home. Now the kitchen is always clean and usually well supplied and when I come home it's ready for me to start cooking. And he's ready to pour me a drink and listen to my day. And so we both cook more now, and I have rediscovered how much joy there can be in making sure that every meal is a thing of loveliness, not just sustenance. I am trying to get back to svelte and I refuse to do that by eating horrible pre-packaged over-processed over-expensive diet foods. I do that by sitting down to a plate of food at dinner that I put thought and love into the composition of. For the first time I'm really grooving on my vegetables. My parents were great cooks but their idea of side vegetables was just fresh steamed. I need a little more pizazz. So, to sum up, I cook because I deserve to enjoy everything that goes in my mouth, because every meal can be a small miracle of composition, because eating out should be a thoughtful choice not just laziness. We enjoy eating out much more now, too, because it's not just a commonplace thing. I'm eating much, much healthier than I was before, and yet I'm also eating much, much tastier food. It's really about keeping body and soul together.

On the topic of gender assumptions: I am an omnivore, leaning toward carnivore. My lovely husband is an omnivore leaning very strongly toward herbivore. When we go out, I usually order something of a hefty meaty nature, and he usually orders something of a vegetable-centered nature. Without fail, even if it's the same person who took our order, when our food comes out of the kitchen the waiter will attempt to give my husband my hefty meaty food, and me his wee bit of salady thing. We think that it may be because there seem to be more women who are vegetarian and/or who are watching their weight, but it still bugs me every time!

My parents are both damn fine cooks. However, my mother, bless her, was interested in serving us spicy foods, because we lived in the bland food capital of the universe. Spicy foods in this context equalled "curry." Curry was made with tinned tuna, white sauce with a couple of teaspoons of curry powder in it, raisins, and rice. Maybe peanuts if we were being fancy. When I was about 11, a Malaysian student came to the University and was in our social circle. He came over and taught mum how to cook genuinely spicy foods, and all were reprieved from the horror of "curry", that was never cooked again. I could say horrible things about her smoked cod and potato pie, but actually it's a traditional recipe, and she does it well, I just can't stand the taste.

oh, boy. This reminded me of my the grilled cheese sandwiches I discovered in high school. I would occasionally make them with bacon, and then I discovered frying the sandwiches in the bacon fat. I don't make them like that anymore. *edited* again to add, welcome to eG, Idlewild! What a great first post... ← Ooh, I just saw this post. Thank you, I registered especially to join in this delightful thread, even if it did end up making me hungry for bread and dripping. ;)

My husband was a vegetarian after college, so we kept a vegetarian kitchen until recently. I'm not sure what changed, but all of a sudden he decided he didn't care any more. He was never a vegetarian for ideological reasons really, anyway. Of the two of us, I dare say I was more informed about global food and health issues. I found it really hard to make good, balanced meals we both enjoyed while we were not using any meat at home - we relied way too much on cheese. He's also a trifle picky, and so am I, but in different directions. I don't like our stir-fried vegetables, they really lack something, and I should figure out how to make them better, but since that was his default 'healthy' suggestion, and he didn't want some of my choices, we'd always end up compromising on homemade garlic pizza or cheese enchiladas. Now that we're cooking meat at home again I'm back in my stride. But we've also done something that we probably should have done with the vegetarian food - more compromise about just eating whatever the other person is cooking and not fussing about it. I don't know what brought that on either except for a consciousness that we were eating pretty badly - though tastily- and that wouldn't change without an effort on both our parts to be more flexible. I am certainly relieved that meat's back on the menu, but we still don't eat it every night by any means. And I was so proud of my husband when he cut up some stewing steak for a casserole! He's still definitely shy of handling meat, having never prepared it before. I'm surprised, because his mother is a good cook, but I have the hardest time getting him to try things like porkchops because he always had them overcooked before. I'm not sure he'll ever like his meat as meaty as I do (we're compromising on chicken breasts for him and thighs for me!) but at least I feel more comfortable with meal planning again. I know one can plan a perfectly nutritious weekly vegetarian menu, but the simple fact was I grew up cooking meat and he grew up not cooking that much, so neither of us had the experience to do it well. He's a good cook though. Those cheese enchiladas are to die for!

I need to find the recipe again - perfectly rich, light, delicious golden tea-cake, turned out of the pan onto a cooling rack, then lavishly topped with butter, sugar and cinnamon.

My grandmother was the source of childhood treats. It's a little funny - her mother, my mother's grandmother, used to spoil MY mother rotten with home baked goodies. My grandmother, on the other hand, never really learned to cook. Her mother, the fabulous baker, didn't like having anyone underfoot in the kitchen. So MY grandmother's treats for us were of a somewhat less home-made nature. She had my brother hooked on stuffed green olives since before he could walk. I was a disappointment, not having the same palate for grown up food that he did. She also used to slip us sips of her sweet sherry which was abysmal. However, I can't complain since she was also responsible for my first glass of champagne, at her 75th birthday when I was 10. The one thing I remember most of all though is that when I was 10 or 11 I'd go to her apartment after school - I was a latchkey kid, and it wasn't that she was supposed to babysit me, it was that we genuinely really enjoyed each other's company. She'd give me the most abysmal green cordial (not the alcoholic stuff, fruit cordial in Australia is like kool-aid but you mix it from syrup not powder) that was an unidentifiable limish flavour, and then she'd let me choose between chocolate biscuits (tim tams or mint slices, which are like thin mints only they have a layer of peppermint cream in the middle) OR I could have some Breton crackers and pate from a little tin of pate de fois. Although I've always been a chocolate lover, I couldn't get enough of the pate. I think I redeemed myself for the whole not loving olives enough at an early age thing. I miss my grandmother terribly. She really wanted us to appreciate the finer things in life and not grow up provincial. Of course, since she couldn't cook at all and also sometimes had to feed my brother and I an entire meal, not just snacks, she also used to spoil us by giving us bacon and tater tots, and baby carrots from a tin. She'd always say that it was only bread and dripping for lunch (and be astounded that I actually WANTED bread and dripping, another family treat after a roast meal), but then we'd always get bacon and tater tots, which my parents would never let us have, so it was a real pleasure. My mother, who broke the cycle and taught herself AND us kids to cook, used to make cheese straws as a treat when she had left over pastry from making a quiche, which she did quite often. My dad used to spoil us by crisping up the rinds of bacon and letting us eat them. Yum.