I Made A Soufflé!

During the four years that I've been doing this blog, I've written mostly about gardening, with a few side trips into food, wine and travel.

I'm still going to be doing that, but I'm also planning to write a little more about actually cooking the food we grow.  Since Cindy is an excellent and very creative cook, she's always done most of the cooking, and, since cooking has always pretty much terrified me, that's been just fine with me.

But that's not really fair to Cindy, so a couple of years ago, as a Christmas present for Cindy, I volunteered to make dinner once a month, as long as opening a bag of frozen stuff was an acceptable dinner.  I did have one dish I could make with reasonable confidence, and that was spaghetti and meatballs.  Cindy showed me how to make a delicious tomato sauce for the meatballs out of our own pureed tomatoes; it was really nice to know that I was actually making something with the food we grow in our yard.

Last summer our friend Barbara came down to visit us for "cooking camp".  Barbara wanted Cindy to teach her how to use her new pressure cooker, a device that is still waaaaaay beyond my comfort level, and I wanted to learn how to make Chicken Piccata, a dish I really like (it has capers in it, who wouldn't like it?).  That proved to be within my capability, and I can now make it with some degree of confidence.

That small step led me to think about what other dishes I like to eat, so maybe I could learn to cook them, too.

With some degree of trepidation, I asked Cindy a couple of months ago if she thought I could learn to cook a cheese soufflé.  I knew it was a complicated dish, but it's one I really love to eat.  To my surprise, she jumped at the chance to teach me how to do it.  I've done it a couple of times since with her standing close by to supervise.  A couple of nights ago, I cooked a cheese soufflé pretty much by myself, with only a few cries of "Cinnnnndy, does this look O.K.?????"

So this slight increase in confidence led me to make Cindy another gift this past Christmas:  the promise to learn four new dishes to add to my existing small repertoire, which I will continue to practice.  I'm going to learn how to do fried chicken (Yessss!  Throw Brer Rabbit into that briar patch!), a salmon dish, a dish from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking that Cindy recently was given, and a dish of Cindy's choosing.  

Tonight:  fried chicken.  We'll see how it goes.