which_chick | (no subject)

I want to make chocolate pudding. The real kind, not that fake crap from a box. There may always be room for Jay Ee Ell Ell Oh on the tv, but that stuff isn't allowed on my freaking watch. Life is too short for chemical-tasting pudding. If I'm having pudding, which I shouldn't because it's not particularly good for me, I will be having the real deal, made from actual ingredients like milk, cornstarch, cocoa, and sugar, cooked over a stove. Real pudding is hella better than the box kind. Honest.

Right now I'm contemplating whether or not the level of improvement I'd get from having better cocoa than Hershey's would be worth the expense. See, it'd have to go on the food budget. If I spent ten bucks on six ounces of cocoa powder, that'd go on the food budget. I'd have to admit to you people that I am willing to spend that kind of money on cocoa and then I might as well write SUCKER on my forehead with a Sharpie so that the whole world will know what you have done for China. (Sorry, channelling the emperor from Mulan.)

Also, the timeframe thing is something of a problem. I live in bumfuck, so if I want cocoa powder that isn't Hershey's, I'll be getting it via mail order. I have a mail order source for expensive, gourmet chocolate of the sort that ought to be a controlled substance, but I'm not going to pay for them to overnight it to me. Since that's the case, I might not want chocolate pudding by the time the cocoa gets here. *sigh* That'd suck.

On a related note, I want one of those ketchup bottle thingies that chef types use to drizzle brightly-colored sauces decoratively. That just looks like way too much fun, the making of sauces and the drizzling of them decoratively over the plate and/or food. I want. We will all refrain from pointing out that there is nobody to see me playing chef except two exceedingly uninterested cats. I don't have a TV. I don't get to watch Emeril or that heretical Alton person who doesn't believe in stuffing turkeys. If I want cooking-as-entertainment, I have to do it myself. I am the *bam* in my world. And I want a squeeze bottle to drizzle stuff on my food. I'll make the drizzle (Y'know, I betcha Snoop Dogg loves that word. I just bet.) myself. I got no problem with that. I can make color-saturated flavorful stuff to drizzle on other stuff.

Besides, it'd be good for me to plate things occasionally. My mother is dead certain I'm going to go straight to hell if I keep eating out of the pan. My view is that it's one less thing to wash, but she could be right. She was right about the glories of chuck steak, after all. Maybe she has a line on the relationship between eternal hellfire and eating out of the pan.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

In my world, one is not allowed to use "plate" as a verb unless electricity and a metallic chemical bath are involved.

Ten bucks for six ounces of cocoa powder is obscene. No food-processing orgnization deserves that much money for that little food, unless it has to be brought out of the high mountains through a war zone. And we call that kind of food "Schedule I Narcotics."

Drizzling is hella fun! I used to work for a restaurant that was very into food presentation, and one of my favorite chores was decorating the desserts. Whenever anyone ordered a slice of ice-cream pie, I'd do this doodly thing with it by holding the bottle as high above the plate as possible and not squeezing it, but rather just letting it run out in a fine stream. It looked a lot like the designs you get from a Spirograph.

Yes, exactly! I've never worked in anything but a fast food place, but food presentation and/or prep is the sort of thing I might like, at least in terms of appealing to the anal-retentive love of sameness that doesn't exactly *lurk* beneath my more appealing traits. (It isn't lurking if it's one of the first things people notice...)

It is fun. Just making it look pretty can make a meal seem so much better. I tend to do a froofy brunch for my husband and myself on one day each weekend, and I go to the bother to make up fruit plates with sliced up fruit arranged in a pattern on the plate.

I do stuff like that when I throw a party too. Like if you cut up carrots, you can cut them on a radical diagonal, so that the slices are thin and it makes long ovals, rather than little carroty logs. Cutting celery on a diagonal ensures the stringy bits are shorter, too, which makes it a lot more pleasant to munch.

The carrot and celery thing I got out of a Chinese cookbook, actually. It had a brief chapter on knife technique, aimed at optimal preparation for everything to stir-fry at the same rate. Being as a lot of my cooking is "Asian inspired," I took a lot of those techniques and made them second nature. If I ever have time to kill and money to burn, I think I'd like to take a couple of posh cookery courses. Two of my friends did a knife-skills class that sounds like it was pretty nifty.

This is a fruit plate I did when my folks were out visiting this past summer. I thought it was so pretty I'd take a photo before we ate it!