Sunday, February 7, 2010

Food!

Today is Super Bowl Sunday. For a lot of people this means getting together with friends to watch the game, or the commercials, whichever floats your boat! And at those get togethers there will be food. Chili, chips and dip, wings, pizza, hot dogs whatever is your snack option of choice. We are going to the Steins and really looking forward to Dale's chili. Yum! I am bringing Little Smokies and chocolate chip cookies. Yes, this in not a Weight Watchers friendly day. But it will all be yummy and worth it.

So as I was making cookies this morning I started thinking, who came up with this? Who was the first person to discover that butter creamed with sugar is a piece of heaven? But then it starts going farther back then that. Who was the first person to think to process sugar? To turn milk into butter? And why? What about the flour? Who figured out that grinding grains makes flour? And again, why? And then putting ingredients together and baking them? For those that bake you know you need certain ingredients or your bread won't rise, you cookies will become concrete, your souffle won't well souffle...

So who discovered all of these things? And again, why? Who was the first person to cook their meat? To grind those grains? To slice up veggies and put them in a pot of water to make soup? You get stories about the person who came up with Pizza or with French Fries, but go back further...who was the first person to eat a potato?

I am an adventurous cook, to put it nicely. What that basically means is if I am cooking (not baking, cooking) then I use a recipe as more of a cute suggestion. I take it and tweak it and add and subtract and mix and match and come up with something that is pretty close to the idea the person who originally wrote the recipe had, but isn't really that anymore. But that comes from years of eating and cooking so I have an idea how things taste together and mix. What I don't ever do is pick up something in the store I have never seen before and create a recipe from scratch. So it really is amazing to think that at some point in time every ingredient I use someone else randomly ate to see how it tasted. Then experimented to make recipes.

And as my house fills with the smell of dark chocolate chips melting into cookies I am really glad that they did!

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