A Bit About Cooking

So, a tray of muffins gets put into the oven. One muffin looks at another and asks, “Is it hot in here?” The second muffin looks at the first and goes “AHHH!!! A TALKING MUFFIN!!!”

I enjoy cooking. I am not a chef, I am not a foodie, I just enjoy throwing a bunch of random things together and at the end, eating something that is hopefully delicious. I do have a few standby dishes that I enjoy, like chicken breast in Teriyaki with onions, mushrooms, and banana peppers on some rice, or venison chili with my mix of spices and chili powder, cooking in the crock pot for 16 hours. No, I’m no Colonial Sanders. I’m not even Private Sanders. I just know brown sugar seems to work to cut down the acidity of the tomato juice. Oh, and why venison? Why not? It’s delicious. I know that bacon in the oven can come out crisp and delicious, and make less of a mess than the pan. And I know that when working with raw chicken, SANITIZE AND CLEAN ALL THE THINGS!!!!

I have simple tastes, and I’m not always perfect or good at this. I have failed to hard boil an egg more than once, and a perfectly toasted grilled cheese still escapes me. I don’t fiddle with this, that, and everything else, I just have a couple dishes that I enjoy and I do well. However, the thing is, I’ve mainly worked with meats and vegetables. I’ve never really done any baking, be it bread or donuts. So how am I going to make a pie?

Aye, with no experience, I am to make 2 Bavarian Cream Donut Pies for a contest/fundraiser at the end of July. And why not? Isn’t life about new experiences? Shouldn’t we strive to learn something new any chance we can get? Yes, I am aware that this new experience is going to be consumed by others, so I’ll be making a practice pie before hand, but I’m really excited about this.

The last time I made anything for consumption by the public was cookies in 4H. I used to be active in that, and I tried my hand at the Cooking section in addition to Model Rockets and Electronics that year. Did you know that, in 4H, the Snickerdoodles are supposed to be small? Yeah, I made them the size that I would want to eat, which was about 2.5X the size that they wanted, so even though they were delicious, I got marked down for size. The absurdity of that made me not continue in Cooking in 4H.

I know I will not have this problem for Pie Wars, though, since Pie Pans come in pretty much one size.

Now, I just need some pie pans.
Tony