yummy

One of the things that features prominently in every day at the farmhouse is cooking.  My mom and I bake.  We make big pots of soup and freeze the leftovers.  We try new recipes and cook old favorites.  Always food.  And more food.  Even when we're tired or feeling lazy we eat well.  Comfort food stashed away in the freezer.  Delicious leftovers reheated.  In my old life I felt tired and lazy a lot of the time, but those tired and lazy meals were often laughably weird or inadequate or bought at a drivethru.  What a luxury it is to have the time and inclination to cook and bake and eat and eat and eat.  Of course, it's also not such a good thing because I'm not getting all that much exercise right now.  I hope spring and its labors come soon, or at least before my clothes get too tight.

I used to photograph my cooking all the time and recently I realized that I don't do that very much anymore.  So I got out my camera to snap some food shots.

I wasn't lying about enjoying any excuse for baking cupcakes!

I've made two batches recently.  The first, a chocolate-chocolate-chocolate recipe that my mom found for me, turned out rather strange.  They tasted fine, but their consistency was dense and a bit rubbery.  After that I really wanted to make my favorite, a recipe from The New Best Recipe.  It's a great cookbook and the recipe for cupcakes is delicious.  Instead of the chocolate frosting, I like to make the cream cheese frosting (from their carrot cake recipe).  I like the aesthetic of white-on-white, or rather cream-on-yellow of the cream cheese frosting and yellow cake, but it's also SO tasty.

The other food that I love making (and eating) is pizza.  I've been making pizza since my junior year in college when I finally had a kitchen.  Sometimes it was a rather gross kitchen because I lived with 3 boys for half of the year and 4 for the other half (you don't even want to know about the bathroom), but that year I found solace in cooking and pizza was one of my favorite things to make.  I don't use a recipe (except when, on rare occasions, I make the deep dish, potato dough crust recipe in, you guessed it, The New Best Recipe).  Pizza is so adaptable and I've made it in so many different ways.  During the summers I love running to the garden and cutting all sorts of herbs and picking tomatoes and other fresh ingredients.  Other times I make it with whatever I happen to have on hand.  Last night I made a pizza with mushrooms.

 

I love arranging the mushroom slices carefully on top of the cheese and the watching the pizza bake in the oven.

 

My mom laughs at my predilection to watch things cook.  Listening to music, drinking wine and working on some sort of project is the best way to watch pizza cook.

 

We have leftovers waiting in the fridge for whenever we need a quick meal, or until we can't wait any longer.

Have you been cooking (or eating) anything yummy lately?