Why I've been missing

I've been slacking in keeping up with the posts here but I have a good reason: vacation. After a tough end to the 2nd quarter at work, I was able spend a week at Lorrie's parent's place in the thumb of Michigan. I spent most of it just relaxing, reading a few books. How could you not when this is your surroundings?


These are the neighbors...



It makes it hard to come back to the sprawling exurb and the million or so cars.

But, I was able to do a little research.



The best part of the whole vacation? All the time I got to spend with my love...




Now it's just playing catch-up at work and here...

Happy New Year!

Lorrie and I just returned from spending the weekend at a B&B up in Door County. We love it up there and go back whenever we can. The bed and breakfast is the Inn at Cedar Crossing in Sturgeon Bay. We stayed in the Anniversary Room and it was really nice. The restaurant is excellent and we ate there both nights. I had elk the first night and Filet Mignon the second; Lorrie had chicken risotto the first night and halibut the second.

This capped off our week-long Christmas celebration. We spent time with my family and her family while wildly driving all over eastern Wisconsin. Due to the generosity of our families and Lorrie's and my tendency to go overboard when giving each other gifts, it was a good year for Cookies, Et Cetera. Baking related gifts include a Oberon Design leather journal for my culinary thoughts, a homemade apron with a raven on it, a marble pastry board, a Sil-pin,KitchenAid food grinder attachment,and a Cuisinart stainless steel bowl set.

I also have a whole new slew of cookbooks and kitchen references: a membership to Cook's Illustrated online, The Sweet Life: Desserts from Chanterelleby Kate Zuckerman, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchenby Harold McGee, What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explainedby Robert L. Wolke, Oktoberfest: A Fest Feast : A Book of Traditional Recipes,Baking: From My Home to Yoursby Dorie Greenspan, and Grandmother's Kitchen Wisdom Gold Edition by Dr. Myles H. Bader.

Since the new year is upon us and I'm now more prepared, I thought I'd come up with some resolutions and goals for 2007. Maybe some general things to improve on or specific items I can check off. OK, here it is:

• Incorporate more whole grains into my baking. I can still make cookies, muffins, and other sweets while using whole grain flour.
• More work with candy, especially things other than chocolate. I have a little tendency to focus on chocolate and there are so many other things out there to try.
• More fruit in what I make.
• More cookies. I think I need to live up to the name a little more.
• More healthy recipes. At most for every 3 or 4 posts that use a lot of sweet, sugary ingredients or feature an item with a lot of calories, include 1 that doesn't.
• Take better pictures.
• Specific things to make: a tart, a fruit pie with a filling not from a can (not apple or cherry), a custard pie (with meringue), ice cream, a pudding (not Jell-O), something using puff pastry, a torte, something using ingredients from a local farmer's market, jam (and use as a filling), and petits fours.
• Redesign the site. I used the basic template when I started because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do or if I'd be enjoying myself after doing the site a while. Well, I am enjoying it so I want the site to reflect that and me a little more. I will have to put my coding skills to work here.
• Have fun!

My Thanksgiving

I had the pleasure of spending Thanksgiving this year not in the cold climate of Wisconsin or Michigan but instead in bright and sunny Florida! With their temperatures in the 50's - same as here. Yay. Anyway my sister had moved there back in March and my family went down to visit her. We were also celebrating my dad's 60th birthday. We actually had our Thanksgiving dinner on Wednesday and then spent the day at Epcot in Walt Disney World. on Thursday. Dinner was good and Epcot was a blast My favorite thing was the World Showcase, specifically Norway, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Even did a little shopping and picked up some new cookbooks. They are Norwegian Touches: History, Recipes, Folk Arts Notably Norwegian;Germany's Regional Recipes;and German Cookery: The Crown Classic Cookbook Series (Crown Classic Cookbook).The Norwegian cookbook appealed to me because a lot of the recipes were about cookies and other baked goods. The other selling point is each recipe is introduced by a short paragraph on who submitted the recipe and a little background on the recipe itself. It may discuss a particular tradition or what the recipe means to that person. I picked up the two German cookbooks because I like the recipes. Most of my ancestors were German and I would like to try cooking some of the recipes as they should be made and not reinterpreted for the American public (stollen comes to mind as an example of this trend). It would also be interesting to see how some of my family's recipes differ from the recipes in these books. Plus I like books so they made nice souvenirs.

But unfortunately all this fun has been followed by a downside. Somewhere along the way I picked up a cold. There's probably a connection between my cold and hurtling through the air in a metal tube filled with kids of various ages for a couple of hours but I'm digressing. So there won't be much cooking and baking for me until I feel better. Especially in the case of recipes. I prefer to try a recipe first and have people taste-test it before I post about it, good or bad. They may pick-up on things I don't and vice versa. Plus anything I taste right now has the subtle hint of the Walgreen's NyQuil knock-off to it.