Cooking as Relaxation

A lot of people find cooking relaxing and so do I. I never cooked as a child (or as an adult) until Gregg and I started dating about 5 years ago. It always seemed a waste of time to cook for one and I lived off the potato chip, frozen yogurt diet at the time. I have gradually honed my cooking skills since then. The one thing which I have started doing now (which I never did when I began cooking) is experimenting. Initially, I followed recipes to the “t” but now I rarely do that. I also never measure ingredients which is annoying when I have to give recipes to people. But experimenting is the reason why cooking is so much fun and so relaxing – you never know where you will end up (rather like reading a good book). Like with cooking, you can start a good book and at the end, you either keep it for posterity or it makes you want to throw up!!!!!

The other thing I have tried to do in the past couple of years is to eat better. I am a meatetarian – I do not like fish or vegetables. But one of the things I have been experimenting with is cooking vegetables or beans (or even fish) – things which are better for you than red meat. The only way to make myself eat vegetables or fish is to experiment with them – use them to make dishes which I would like.

This is what I set out to do yesterday. I had not eaten any vegetables for a couple of days. Plus, I had cans of garbanzo beans and red kidney beans in my pantry which I wanted to get rid of. I wanted to see what I could make with it. It ended up being a twist on a traditional Indian recipe which uses chick-peas. I wanted color in the food, so I put the vibrant red kidney beans in with the chickpeas, green peas, sautéed paneer (an Indian cheese) and some diced tomatoes and onions. Add a dash of heavy cream to finish it off and it looked – and tasted – really good. And it was a completely vegetarian meal.

Today, I tried making ghee (clarified butter). This is a very popular cooking ingredient in India and something I use frequently. It is almost the oily part of butter with the milk evaporated. Some lactose intolerant people have reported that they can eat ghee for that reason. Making ghee is both an attempt to save money and an attempt to get it fresh. The Indian store in Lancaster sells it but it does not have the fresh smell I love. Plus, a small tin of ghee costs about $9-$10 at the Indian grocery store. I made the same amount of ghee for only $6. A savings of $4 every 4-6 weeks!!!! The ghee came out quite well though I thought I might have overdone it by a fraction (it turned out to be a little darker than ghee should be). However, the dark color was because of the residue which is supposed to be strained out at the end anyway – the ghee now looks as it should!!!!

Anything you are experimenting with that you want to share (not necessarily in cooking)?