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Meditations on cooking.



There are things that nobody but the cook (or someone in the kitchen with Dinah) gets to taste. Among these things are raw sticky buns (the tail end ones), the sauce left after you've poured the freshly-made apple pie filling into the bottom pie crust, raw cookie dough (salmonella notwithstanding), still-sizzling roasted pumpkin seeds, the crispiest bits of stuffing peeping out of the turkey's butt, and the not-quite-hard-yet bits of peanut brittle left on the heat-proof (to 800 degrees F) spoonula. (Despite the dumbshit name, the spoonula is an awesomely utilitarian item in my kitchen. I love mine.)

For those who wonder where I get the recipes I make, if no other source is listed, it's from the internets. Yay internets. The peanut brittle recipe I used was found here except I don't like macadamia nuts all that well and I have now (officially amended recipe, even) added (a) 1/4 more teasp salt and (b) about 3/4 cup more peanuts, chopped (the other 2 cups were whole) and also I don't like a whole lot of caramelization going on in my nut brittle (distracts from the flavor of the nuts), so I don't heat to 335. I heat to about 300 -- when the drop-test thing sets up hard even in lukewarm water. When I don't give a cite for the recipe I am making, check tastespotting and foodgawker -- it's probably there and I probably didn't follow the directions anyway.

The not-quite-hard-yet bits of peanut brittle can be briefly dunked in water to set them enough to touch and then stretched/mauled as they harden -- it's a food that is also a toy, something that you can enjoy before you turn to the problem of "I have poured hard-crack candy all over the other handle of my big sauce pan YET AGAIN and it has now set up." (Being really smart is not actually very useful for preventing one from doing dumb-ass things.) It's very tasty stuff, the freshly-hardened peanut brittle, reward for your labors.

In other news, I took pictures of the frost patterns on my car this morning because they were so pretty. If I had a better macro lens, I could have taken even better pictures of them. *sigh* I actually went back into the house and grabbed the camera so that I could take frost pictures -- they were that nice.

Oh, and I've started the horse over some jumping gymnastics. Man, prepatory ground poles before the jump really complicate the visual scenery for me. It makes the whole thing, the whole going-over-jumps thing way harder for me. Horse doesn't seem to mind the ground pole part, though.
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