Cooking

I like cooking. It wasn't always this way. I used to hate it in fact. Until I got married. Then I faced the decision either to cook and like what I'm eating or to cook and not like what I'm eating. That settled it quite quickly. I'm by far no fancy cook or anything but it tastes alright most of the times, unless it doesn't. Husband thinks it's great most of the time and the rest of the time he's too nice to comment about it... he often even likes the things I think turned out BAD. Ou well... lately I got a bit bored with my usual meals so I added another little challenge to my live: cook one new meal a week. It's nice to experience with new ideas, adopt them a little bit and be surprised with the result.

The other day I tried a new cake called a Japanese Cotton Cheesecake. And I have to make a confession right here and now: I ate half of the cake. Literally. I did!! I felt horrible. I could not stop myself. If you ever try this cake, you will understand. It's somehow a mixture between a cheesecake and victoria sponge cake and oh so good, fluffy and melt-away-on-your-tongue-ish. I am struggling a bit with keeping my healthy life style at present, I guess the honeymoon phase has gone and really healthy life has started... so here I was eating half a cake all by myself... Ben ate the other half though (okay, Ned had one piece as well).. sigh...

Well, and as it is "me" I'm talking about, cooking wouldn't be cooking without little... uhm... "incidents". Like a couple days ago... I didn't really know what to cook for dinner. Ben re-formated our computer so I wasn't able to check on my weekly meal plan what I'd planed for the day (I am quite faithful in creating this weekly meal plan, but so far I changed things around every single week since starting it), and I could not remember without the computer. So I was procrastinating a bit reading a new novel. Then I got a call from a friend from church if I was able to prepare a meal for someone in church who are struggling. Our church does that, and I think it is an excellent idea. So I said I'd make some pizza sometime this weekend and put it in the freezer in church for those people. That made me think pizza.. hmmm... I was laso thinking about the meal for the next day. For that day we planed to have those people over whose house we are buying, we thought we'd like to get to know them a bit better and they said yes, they'd come. But what do you cook for people you don't really know at all??? Then I thought of Raclette. I love Raclette. People here don't seem to know Raclette at all. So I thought I'd give it a go, it's something fun do to (if you don't have a clue what Raclette is check here). As Raclette is basically unknown on Australian shores I can't find genuine Raclette cheese but any old cheese will do.

All of a sudden those two thoughts (pizza and Raclette) melted into one (just like the cheese in a raclette or on a pizza). Is it possible to make mini-pizzas on the Raclette?? Well, I stopped procrastinating and got to work. I thought I'd give it a trial for dinner for ourselves before trying it on some people we didn't really know.

First I needed to make the pizza dough and lazy that I am at times I thought I'd just pop everything in our breadmaker. I still needed to measure the ingredients though (they really should invent a bread machine which does that for you as well), so I took the pan out of the machine, poured the water in and put in on the scales. Next came the flour. When I tried to put a teaspoon of sugar in... alas... I somehow knocked the whole thing of fthe scales and water and flour was everywhere on the other side of the kitchen counter... where, unluckily, we had our backpacks parked... sigh. Well, finally everything was kinda cleaned up and the machine was doing it's magic so I went to one of our boxes from Germany and went for the search of our Raclette grill. It was found... eventually.

And we discovered that it is an excellent idea to make mini pizzas with your Raclette grill... our guests had so much fun creating their own little pizzas as well as eating Raclette the more traditional way with potatoes. We learned that the lady is an architect and designed the house herself and that it was built by her dad.

And yesss.... dessert was that aweful cotton cheesecake... I shall not make it again in nearer future as I just cannot stop myself.. sigh.... ou well, healthy eating has been established again and now I need to get going an get dinner ready